Putrescine production by engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum

Here, we report the engineering of the industrially relevant Corynebacterium glutamicum for putrescine production. C. glutamicum grew well in the presence of up to 500 mM of putrescine. A reduction of the growth rate by 34% and of biomass formation by 39% was observed at 750 mM of putrescine. C. glutamicum was enabled to produce putrescine by heterologous expression of genes encoding enzymes of the arginine- and ornithine decarboxylase pathways from Escherichia coli. The results showed that the putrescine yield by recombinant C. glutamicum strains provided with the arginine-decarboxylase pathway was 40 times lower than the yield by strains provided with the ornithine decarboxylase pathway. The highest production efficiency was reached by overexpression of speC, encoding the ornithine decarboxylase from E. coli, in combination with chromosomal deletion of genes encoding the arginine repressor ArgR and the ornithine carbamoyltransferase ArgF. In shake-flask batch cultures this strain produced putrescine up to 6 g/L with a space time yield of 0.1 g/L/h. The overall product yield was about 24 mol% (0.12 g/g of glucose).