Model-aided anaerobic metabolic gene knockout of malate dehydrogenase (mdh) gene predicts increased succinate production in Escherichia coli

Abstract

Succinic acid is considers to be a platform chemical with divergent applications as a precursor for syntheses of commodity and specialty chemicals. Its biobased production could be a green technology when produced by microbial fermentation using Escherichia coli as a chassis host. Metabolic engineering for increased production of succinic acid using glucose as substrate is beset with limitation of NADH availability under anaerobic conditions in E. coli. In the present work, we used the most recent genome scale metabolic model of E. coli iJ01366 (Orth et al. 2011) to predict metabolic gene knockout of mdh/b3236 with the aim of increasing NADH availability using the glucose substrate.