Publications

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2014-07-01; 111.26: 9449-54.

Genetically engineering Synechocystis sp. Pasteur Culture Collection 6803 for the sustainable production of the plant secondary metabolite p-coumaric acid

Xue Y, Zhang Y, Cheng D, Daddy S, He Q

PMID: 24927550

Abstract

p-Coumaric acid is the precursor of phenylpropanoids, which are plant secondary metabolites that are beneficial to human health. Tyrosine ammonia lyase catalyzes the production of p-coumaric acid from tyrosine. Because of their photosynthetic ability and biosynthetic versatility, cyanobacteria are promising candidates for the production of certain plant metabolites, including phenylpropanoids. Here, we produced p-coumaric acid in a strain of transgenic cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. Pasteur Culture Collection 6803 (hereafter Synechocystis 6803). Whereas a strain of Synechocystis 6803 genetically engineered to express sam8, a tyrosine ammonia lyase gene from the actinomycete Saccharothrix espanaensis, accumulated little or no p-coumaric acid, a strain that both expressed sam8 and lacked slr1573, a native hypothetical gene shown here to encode a laccase that oxidizes polyphenols, produced ∼82.6 mg/L p-coumaric acid, which was readily purified from the growth medium.


This publication is listed for reference purposes only. It may be included to present a more complete view of a JCVI employee's body of work, or as a reference to a JCVI sponsored project.

Metrics