Engineering of an L-arabinose metabolic pathway in Rhodococcus jostii RHA1 for biofuel production

The oleaginous bacterium, Rhodococcus jostii RHA1 has attracted considerable attention due to its capability to accumulate significant levels of triacylglycerol as renewable hydrocarbon. To enable the strain to utilize arabinose derived from lignocellulosic biomass, the metabolic pathway of L-arabinose utilization was introduced into R. jostii RHA1 by heterogenous expression of the operon, araBAD from Escherichia coli. The results showed that recombinant bearing araBAD could grow on L-arabinose as the sole carbon source, and additional expression of araFGH encoding the arabinose transporter from E. coli could improve the cell biomass yield from high contents of arabinose. We further increased the content of lipid produced from arabinose in the recombinants from 47.9 to 56.8 % of the cell dry weight (CDW) by overexpression of a gene, atf1 encoding a diglyceride acyltransferase from R. opacus PD630. This work demonstrated the feasibility of producing lipid from arabinose by genetic modification of the rhodococci strain.