Heterologous biosynthesis of natural product naringenin by co-culture engineering

Co-culture engineering is an emerging approach for microbial biosynthesis of a variety of biochemicals. In this study, E. coli-E. coli co-cultures were developed for heterologous biosynthesis of the natural product naringenin. The co-cultures were composed of two independent E. coli strains dedicated to functional expression of different portions of the biosynthetic pathway, respectively. The co-culture biosynthesis was optimized by investigating the effect of carbon source, E. coli strain selection, timing of IPTG induction and the inoculation ratio between the co-culture strains. Compared with the mono-culture strategy, the utilization of the designed co-cultures significantly improved the naringenin production, largely due to the reduction of metabolic stress, employment of proper hosts for improving pathway enzyme activities, and flexible adjustment of the relative biosynthetic strength between the co-culture strains. The findings of this study extend the applicability of co-culture engineering in complex natural product biosynthesis.