Escherichia coli Enoyl-Acyl Carrier Protein Reductase (FabI) Supports Efficient Operation of a Functional Reversal of the β-Oxidation Cycle

We recently used a synthetic/bottom-up approach to establish the identity of the four enzymes composing an engineered functional reversal of the beta-oxidation cycle for fuel and chemical production in Escherichia coli (J. M. Clomburg, J. E. Vick, M. D. Blankschien, M. Rodriguez-Moya, and R. Gonzalez, ACS Synth Biol 1:541-554, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/sb3000782). While native enzymes that catalyze the first three steps of the pathway were identified, the identity of the native enzyme(s) acting as the trans-enoyl coenzyme A (CoA) reductase(s) remained unknown, limiting the amount of product that could be synthesized (e.g., 0.34 g/liter butyrate) and requiring the overexpression of a foreign enzyme (the Euglena gracilis trans-enoyl-CoA reductase [EgTER]) to achieve high titers (e.g., 3.4 g/liter butyrate). Here, we examine several native E. coli enzymes hypothesized to catalyze the reduction of enoyl-CoAs to acyl-CoAs. Our results indicate that FabI, the native enoyl-acyl carrier protein (enoyl-ACP) reductase (ENR) from type II fatty acid biosynthesis, possesses sufficient NADH-dependent TER activity to support the efficient operation of a beta-oxidation reversal. Overexpression of FabI proved as effective as EgTER for the production of butyrate and longer-chain carboxylic acids. Given the essential nature of fabI, we investigated whether bacterial ENRs from other families were able to complement a fabI deletion without promiscuous reduction of crotonyl-CoA. These characteristics from Bacillus subtilis FabL enabled Delta fabI complementation experiments that conclusively established that FabI encodes a native enoyl-CoA reductase activity that supports the beta-oxidation reversal in E. coli.