S11: Synthetic biology toward metabolic engineering of mevalonate pathway

Synthetic biology is a powerful tool to engineer metabolic pathways to optimize and improve the production of target compounds. Heterologously expressed mevalonate pathway has been engineered as one of the major biosynthetic pathways for the production of various isoprenoids in E. coli. The engineering of mevalonate pathway to produce more IPP (isopentenyl diphosphate) and DMAPP (3, 3-dimethylallyl diphosphate) is one of the main approach to improve the production of isoprenoids. Recently developed biobrick standard cloning platform has been used to engineer the pathway toward improved production of isoprenoid compounds.

In this study, we present several engineering strategies of the top portion and the bottom portion of mevalonate pathway using biobrick platform. Targeted proteomic analysis of the pathway enzymes has accelerated the identification of bottle necks in the metabolic pathway, and the optimization of the protein expression improved the production yield significantly.