Recently, our group engineered O. polymorpha for bioproduction of 3-hydroxypropionate (3-HP) from sole methanol.

3-HP, one of the top value-added chemicals recognized by the US Department of Energy, can be used for synthesis of acrylic acid, acrylamide and 1,3‐propanediol. The current 3-HP biosynthesis mainly utilizes glucose as feedstock, and the rapid growing demand requires to seek alternative feedstock without depending on the arable land. Methanol, which can be produced either from coal and natural gas, or directly from CO₂ by hydrogenation, has great potential as a feedstock for third generation biorefinery.

In this study, we optimized the expression of malonyl-CoA reductase Mcr, enhanced the supply of precursor malonyl-CoA and cofactor NADPH, which resulted in production of 7.10 g/L 3-HP from sole methanol with a yield of 0.14 g/g. This result showed the great potential of O. polymorphas methanol cell factory to produce value-added chemicals.

This study was published in Chinese Journal of Catalysis. This work was funded by National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and DICP innovation grant from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics. (Text and image by Wei Yu)

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1872-2067(22)64195-0

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