Sang-Hwal Yoon, Hye-Min Park, Sook-Hee Lee, Eun-Gyeong Lee, Hee-Kyoung Ryu, Chong-Long Wang, Hee-Jung Jang, Ji-Seon Park, Amitabha Das, and Seon-Won Kim. Division of Applied Life Science, Gyeongsang National University, 900 Gajwadong, Jinju, 660-701, South Korea
Lycopene, a precursor of various carotenoids can be synthesized from FPP in E. coli by introduction of crtE, crtB, and crtI. Moreover, the lycopene-producing E. coli is able to produce β-carotene, zeaxanthin, or astaxanthin by introduction of crtY, crtZ, or crtW. The plasmids, pT-LYCm4 for lycopene, pT-HB for β-carotene, and pT-ZUM6 for zeaxanthin were constructed to produce each carotenoid in E. coli. β-Carotene can be converted to astaxanthin via zeaxanthin by crtZ, or via canthaxanthin by crtW. For production of astaxanthin in E. coli (pT-ZUM6), crtW and crtZ genes were cloned from 6 bacteria, Brevundimonas aurantiaca, Brevundimonas vesicularis, Novosphingobium aromaticivorum, Parvularcula burmudensis, Robiginitalea biformata, and Xanthobacter autotrophicus. Astaxanthin of 5.4 mg/L and other intermediate carotenoids were produced from the E. coli (pT-ZUM6) harboring crtW of B. vesicularis. There are various intermediate carotenoids on the biosynthetic pathway from b-carotene to astaxanthin. The crtZ and crtW cloned from the other bacteria did not show significant activities.This work was supported by the EB-NCRC (Grant No. R15-2003-012-02001-0), BioGreen 21 Program (Grant No. 2005041034590), Brain Pool program and BK21 program of Korea