Engineering of xylose metabolism in Escherichia coli for the production of valuable compounds

Abstract

The lignocellulosic sugar d-xylose has recently gained prominence as an inexpensive alternative substrate for the production of value-added compounds using genetically modified organisms. Among the prokaryotes, Escherichia coli has become the de facto host for the development of engineered microbial cell factories. The favored status of E. coli resulted from a century of scientific explorations leading to a deep understanding of its systems. However, there are limited literature reviews that discuss engineered E. coli as a platform for the conversion of d-xylose to any target compounds. Additionally, available critical review articles tend to focus on products rather than the host itself. This review aims to provide relevant and current information about significant advances in the metabolic engineering of d-xylose metabolism in E. coli. This focusses on unconventional and synthetic d-xylose metabolic pathways as several review articles have already discussed the engineering of native d-xylose metabolism. This paper, in particular, is essential to those who are working on engineering of d-xylose metabolism using E. coli as the host.

Keywords:

• d-xylose
• Escherichia coli
• metabolic engineering
• xylose isomerase pathway
• xylose-reductase-xylitol dehydrogenase pathway
• xylose oxidative pathway
• d-xylulose-1-phosphate pathway
• d-ribulose-1-phosphate dependent pathway

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) under the Basic Science Research Program through the Ministry of Education [2018R1D1A1B07043993 and 2020R1A6A1A03038817], and by the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy [MOTIE No. 20194010201750].