Direct Utilization of Sorghum Extract Sugars As a Feedstock for Fatty Acid Production Using Metabolically Engineered Escherichia coli Strains

Depleting petroleum resources, increasing energy demand and environmental concerns have attracted significant attention to develop novel processes for production of renewable hydrocarbon fuels. Production of microbial high-density fuels using ‘consolidated bioprocessing’ is of enormous interest. Current study reports on direct utilization of sorghum extract sugars as a renewable carbon source for free fatty acid production with the help of metabolically engineered E. coli. In order to reduce the production cost of fatty acids, direct sucrose utilizing E. coli strains were developed by incorporating pUR400 plasmid into ML103 pXZ18 and ML103 pXZ18Z to generate ML103 pXZ18 pUR400 and ML103 pXZ18Z pUR400. Newly created strains showed to utilize mixture of pure sugars and sorghum juice efficiently. The 24h pH adjusted culture of ML103 pXZ18Z pUR400 produced maximum of 6.18 ± 0.52 g/L with 30 g/L of pure sugar mixture and 2.95 ± 0.04 with sorghum juice (15 g/L equivalent sugar concentration.).