Development of the hosts that have desirable metabolic phenotypes and ability to produce heterologous products is an important issue in microbial metabolic engineering. Utilizing various algorithms, GEMM based approaches enabled scientists to recognize gene deletion or overexpression targets for developing cell factories. For example, using MOMA simulations, L-valine biosynthesis was successfully improved in an engineered E. coli strain (Park et al. 2007). Also, amplification of idi gene selected by FSEOF together with the dxs gene led to lycopene overproduction (Choi et al. 2010). However, metabolic phenotypes prediction after gene deletion is much simpler than that after gene amplification. Because the corresponding metabolic fluxes of the deleted gene can be assumed as zero, while, owing to complex regulation of the metabolic network, the corresponding fluxes of the amplified genes do not certainly increase. Moreover, the amount of increase in metabolic fluxes corresponding to the gene amplification is difficult to be predicted. In this study, in order to increase the flux towards antiEpEX-scFv overproduction, the glk gene was selected for amplification among the several targets predicted by FVSEOF.
According to our results, recombinant expression of scFv and glk resulted in a decrease in the maximum specific growth rate of the recombinant strains compared with the parent strain. A decrease in the growth rate is normally detectable in bacteria transformed with multicopy plasmids to produce a recombinant protein. Actually, plasmid DNA replication, plasmid-encoded mRNA synthesis and translation in bacteria frequently place a metabolic burden into the engineered strains that usually results in growth retardation (Flores et al. 2004). This metabolic burden may be due to the cell inability to supply the extra demand of energy and building blocks required for plasmid replication and foreign multicopy genes expression (Li and Rinas 2020). However, a significant increase was observed in the µ max of the recombinant strains from 0.592 ± 0.003 in BW25113-Duet-scFv to 0.81 ± 0.043 in BW25113-Duet-glk-scFv when the expression of the glk gene was increased which was comparable to the wild-type strain (0.729 ± 0.022). glk gene encodes the enzyme glucokinase catalyzing the ATP-dependent phosphorylation of the glucose that was imported by GalP. glk overexpression probably compensates the special metabolic demands of the engineered strains via increasing the carbon flux into the PP pathway. The PP pathway which is closely interconnected with glycolysis normally provides some of the required blocks for biosynthesis of histidine, nucleotide and aromatic amino acids e.g., erythrose-4-phosphate (E4P) and ribose-5- phosphate (R5P) (Stincone et al. 2015). Also NADPH, a power of biosynthetic reactions, was reduced in its oxidative branch (Christodoulou et al. 2018). In a similar study, engineering of the pentose phosphate pathway led to reduction of the metabolic load caused by the recombinant protein production (Flores et al. 2004). Moreover, using this approach, a significant positive effect was observed on the productivity of scFv producing strains in the current study. The glk -overexpressed strain produced approximately 2.135 times higher titer of scFv than the strain with no glk overexpression. So, the metabolic engineering target predicted in our study was validated via the improvement observed in the scFv production.
Recently, the integration of the computational methods and omics at the systems level can empower metabolic engineering. Employing DNA microarray, oh et al revealed that the overproduction of recombinant non-toxic LuxA could lead to the downregulation of ppc, fba, gnd, and atpA genes as well as upregulation of heat shock and glk genes in E. coli strains including JM109, MC4100, and VJS676A. Based on the transcriptome profile obtained in oh et al study, glucose kinase might have the major role instead of the phosphotransferase system (PTS) to provide glucose6-phosphate in protein overproducing condition in the E. coli cells (Oh and Liao 2000). On the other hand, overexpression of the recombinant proteins was shown to induce heat shock genes and rapid stress response. Interestingly, glk has been reported to play an essential role in bacterial stress responses. Although, this gene plays a minor role in glucose metabolism, but under stress condition like heterologous protein expression or growth in acidic condition, this glycolysis enzyme is required to supply sufficient level of glucose6-phosphate (Arora and Pedersen 1995; Zhang et al. 2020). So, glk seems to be a suitable target gene to be overexpressed to achieve increased recombinant protein productivity, which is consistent with our results.
Here, the GEMM-guided metabolic engineering strategy was used to improve the scFv production in Escherichia coli BW25113 (DE3). The engineered strain with glk overexpression successfully increased scFv production. The titer of antiEpEX-scFv reached 235.41 ± 9.53 µg/mL (0.428 g/g DCW) in the engineered strain compared with the parent strain (110.236 ± 7.68 µg/mL; 0.202 g/g DCW). Our method for the production of scFv is a successful example which can be considered for the improvement of other recombinant proteins production.