earticle

영어

Branched chain amino acids, including L-valine, L-leucine, and L-isoleucine, have gained commercial attention due to their important applications in feed additives, pharmaceuticals as well as cosmetics. We focused our research on the microbial production of L-isoleucine, one of essential amino acids, which has been utilized as a constituent of infusions and dietary products.
Biosynthetic pathway of L-isoleucine in Escherichia coli consists of five enzymatic reactions from L-threonine as a starting metabolite. Along this pathway, E. coli possesses complex regulatory mechanism by feedback inhibition and transcription regulation. In this study, we attempted to remove metabolic regulations that hamper the production of L-isoleucine,
and then to overexpress genes encoding enzymatic reactions and exporters that facilitate production of L-isoleucine. L-isoleucine-producing E. coli strain developed in this study demonstrates that metabolic engineering approaches could contribute to the construction of industrial strains in the field of amino acids. [This work was supported by the Korean Systems
Biology Research Project (20090065571) of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) through the National Research Foundation. Further supports by the World Class University Program (R32-2008-000- 10142-0) of the MEST, LG Chem Chair Professorship, IBM SUR program, and Microsoft are appreciated.]