GroE chaperonins assisted functional expression of bacterial enzymes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Rapid advances in the capabilities of reading and writing DNA along with increasing understanding of microbial metabolism at the systems-level have paved an incredible path for metabolic engineering. Despite these advances, post-translational tools facilitating functional expression of heterologous enzymes in model hosts have not been developed well. Some bacterial enzymes, such as Escherichia coli xylose isomerase (XI) and arabinose isomerase (AI) which are essential for utilizing cellulosic sugars, cannot be functionally expressed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We hypothesized and demonstrated that the mismatching of the HSP60 chaperone systems between bacterial and eukaryotic cells might be the reason these bacterial enzymes cannot be functionally expressed in yeast. The results showed that the co-expression of E. coli GroE can facilitate the functional expression of E. coli XI and AI, as well as the Agrobacterium tumefaciens D-psicose epimerase in S. cerevisiae. The co-expression of bacterial chaperonins in S. cerevisiae is a promising post-translational strategy for the functional expression of bacterial enzymes in yeast. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2016;113: 2149–2155.