Hemanshu Mundhada

Reengineered glucose oxidase for amperometric glucose determination in diabetes analytics.

Glucose oxidase is an oxidoreductase exhibiting a high β-D-glucose specificity and high stability which renders glucose oxidase well-suited for applications in diabetes care. Nevertheless, GOx activity is highly oxygen dependent which can lead to inaccuracies in amperometric β-D-glucose determinations. Therefore a directed evolution campaign with two rounds of random mutagenesis (SeSaM followed by epPCR), site saturation mutagenesis studies on individual positions, and one simultaneous site saturation library (OmniChange; 4 positions) was performed. A diabetes care well suited mediator (quinone diimine) was selected and the GOx variant (T30V I94V) served as starting point. For directed GOx evolution a microtiter plate detection system based on the quinone diimine mediator was developed and the well-known ABTS-assay was applied in microtiter plate format to validate oxygen independency of improved GOx variants. Two iterative rounds of random diversity generation and screening yielded to two subsets of amino acid positions which mainly improved activity (A173, A332) and oxygen independency (F414, V560). Simultaneous site saturation of all four positions with a reduced subset of amino acids using the OmniChange method yielded finally variant V7 with a 37-fold decreased oxygen dependency (mediator activity: 7.4 U/mg WT, 47.5 U/mg V7; oxygen activity: 172.3 U/mg WT, 30.1 U/mg V7). V7 is still highly β-D-glucose specific, highly active with the quinone diimine mediator and thermal resistance is retained (prerequisite for GOx coating of diabetes test stripes). The latter properties and V7s oxygen insensitivity make V7 a very promising candidate to replace standard GOx in diabetes care applications.

Increased production of L-serine in Escherichia coli through Adaptive Laboratory Evolution

L-serine is a promising building block biochemical with a high theoretical production yield from glucose. Toxicity of L-serine is however prohibitive for high-titer production in E. coli. Here, E. coli lacking L-serine degradation pathways was evolved for improved tolerance by gradually increasing L-serine concentration from 3 to 100g/L using adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE). Genome sequencing of isolated clones revealed multiplication of genetic regions, as well as mutations in thrA, thereby showing a potential mechanism of serine inhibition. Additional mutations were evaluated by MAGE combined with amplicon sequencing, revealing role of rho, lrp, pykF, eno, and rpoB on tolerance and fitness in minimal medium. Production using the tolerant strains resulted in 37g/L of L-serine with a 24% mass yield. The resulting titer is similar to the highest production reported for any organism thereby highlighting the potential of ALE for industrial biotechnology.

Engineering of high yield production of L‐serine in Escherichia coli

L‐serine is a widely used amino acid that has been proposed as a potential building block biochemical. The high theoretical yield from glucose makes a fermentation based production attractive. In order to achieve this goal, serine degradation to pyruvate and glycine in E. coli MG1655 was prevented by deletion of three L‐serine deaminases sdaA, sdaB, and tdcG, as well as serine hydroxyl methyl transferase (SHMT) encoded by glyA. Upon overexpression of the serine production pathway, consisting of a feedback resistant version of serA along with serB and serC, this quadruple deletion strain showed a very high serine production yield (0.45u2009g/g glucose) during small‐scale batch fermentation in minimal medium. Serine, however, was found to be highly toxic even at low concentrations to this strain, which lead to slow growth and production during fed batch fermentation, resulting in a serine production of 8.3u2009g/L. The production strain was therefore evolved by random mutagenesis to achieve increased tolerance towards serine. Additionally, overexpression of eamA, a cysteine/homoserine transporter was demonstrated to increase serine tolerance from 1.6u2009g/L to 25u2009g/L. During fed batch fermentation, the resulting strain lead to the serine production titer of 11.7u2009g/L with yield of 0.43u2009g/g glucose, which is the highest yield reported so far for any organism. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2016;113: 807–816.

P-LinK: A method for generating multicomponent cytochrome P450 fusions with variable linker length.

Fusion protein construction is a widely employed biochemical technique, especially when it comes to multi-component enzymes such as cytochrome P450s. Here we describe a novel method for generating fusion proteins with variable linker lengths, protein fusion with variable linker insertion (P-LinK), which was validated by fusing P450cin monooxygenase (CinA) to the flavodoxin shuttle protein (CinC). CinC was fused to the C terminus of CinA through a series of 16 amino acid linkers of different lengths in a single experiment employing 3 PCR amplifications. Screening for 2-β-hydroxy-1,8-cineole production by CinA-CinC fusion proteins revealed that enzymatically active variants possessed linker lengths of more than 5 amino acids, reaching optimum enzyme activity at a linker length of 10 amino acids. Our P-LinK method not only minimizes experimental effort and significantly reduces time demands but also requires only a single cloning and transformation step in order to generate multiple linker variants (1 to 16 amino acids long), making the approach technically simple and robust.

Selecting of a cytochrome P450cam SeSaM library with 3-chloroindole and endosulfan – Identification of mutants that dehalogenate 3-chloroindole

Cytochrome P450cam (a camphor hydroxylase) from the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida shows potential importance in environmental applications such as the degradation of chlorinated organic pollutants. Seven P450cam mutants generated from Sequence Saturation Mutagenesis (SeSaM) and isolated by selection on minimal media with either 3-chloroindole or the insecticide endosulfan were studied for their ability to oxidize of 3-chloroindole to isatin. The wild-type enzyme did not accept 3-chloroindole as a substrate. Mutant (E156G/V247F/V253G/F256S) had the highest maximal velocity in the conversion of 3-chloroindole to isatin, whereas mutants (T56A/N116H/D297N) and (G60S/Y75H) had highest kcat/KM values. Six of the mutants had more than one mutation, and within this set, mutation of residues 297 and 179 was observed twice. Docking simulations were performed on models of the mutant enzymes; the wild-type did not accommodate 3-chloroindole in the active site, whereas all the mutants did. We propose two potential reaction pathways for dechlorination of 3-chloroindole. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Cytochrome P450 biodiversity and biotechnology, edited by Erika Plettner, Gianfranco Gilardi, Luet Wong, Vlada Urlacher, Jared Goldstone.