Expanding genetic regulatory and efflux mechanisms for improved polymyxin production in Paenibacillus polymyxa.
Pei J, Hou Y, Li Y, Liu K, Dai L
Soil Health
The soil microbe doing this work already colonizes roots in gardens and farms worldwide, keeping plants healthy by outcompeting pathogens, so improvements in how it makes antibiotics could eventually translate into better biological crop-protection products that reduce the need for synthetic fungicides.
There's a bacterium that lives naturally around plant roots, helps them grow, and fights off harmful pathogens. Scientists figured out how to make it produce much more of its natural antibiotic by tweaking a single spot on one of its proteins. They also fed it on cheap leftovers from sugar production and wood pulp processing, showing this could be done affordably at industrial scale.
Key Findings
A single amino acid swap (T38W) in the efflux transporter PmxD boosted polymyxin P production nearly fourfold over wild-type in lab conditions.
Deleting transporter genes pmxCD cut polymyxin P output by roughly 50%, confirming the transporter's role in secretion.
Using a low-cost medium of cellulose hydrolysate and sugarcane molasses, the engineered strain produced 87.66 mg/L vs. 70.31 mg/L in the control, a 24.68% titer improvement.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers engineered a soil bacterium that naturally protects plant roots to produce far more of an antibiotic compound called polymyxin, using cheap agricultural waste as feed stock. A single protein tweak boosted output by 25% even on low-cost sugarcane molasses and cellulose scraps.
Abstract Preview
Paenibacillus polymyxa is a plant growth-promoting rhizobacterium widely employed as a chassis organism in biomanufacturing. In this study, inducible regulatory systems and polymyxin efflux mechani...
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