Soluble versions of outer membrane cytochromes function as exporters for heterologously produced cargo proteins.

This study reveals that it is possible to secrete truncated versions of outer membrane cytochromes into the culture supernatant and that these proteins can provide a basis for the export of heterologously produced proteins. Different soluble and truncated versions of the outer membrane cytochrome MtrF were analyzed for their suitability to be secreted. A protein version with a very short truncation of the N-terminus to remove the recognition sequence for the addition of a lipid anchor is secreted efficiently to the culture supernatant, and moreover this protein could be further truncated by a deletion of 160 amino acid and still is detectable in the supernatant. By coupling a cellulase to this soluble outer membrane cytochrome, the export efficiency was measured by means of relative cellulase activity. We conclude that outer membrane cytochromes of S. oneidensis can be applied as transporters for the export of target proteins into the medium using the type II secretion pathway.

Extracellular reduction of solid electron acceptors by Shewanella oneidensis.

Shewanella oneidensis is the best understood model organism for the study of dissimilatory iron reduction. This review focuses on the current state of our knowledge regarding this extracellular respiratory process and highlights its physiologic, regulatory and biochemical requirements. It seems that we have widely understood how respiratory electrons can reach the cell surface and what the minimal set of electron transport proteins to the cell surface is. Nevertheless, even after decades of work in different research groups around the globe there are still several important questions that were not answered yet. In particular, the physiology of this organism, the possible evolutionary benefit of some responses to anoxic conditions, as well as the exact mechanism of electron transfer onto solid electron acceptors are yet to be addressed. The elucidation of these questions will be a great challenge for future work and important for the application of extracellular respiration in biotechnological processes.

Acetoin production via unbalanced fermentation in Shewanella oneidensis.

This study describes the realization of an anoxic acetoin production process using the proteobacterium Shewanella oneidensis. Fermentative processes are of high biotechnological relevance since they offer high productivity and a low percentage of substrate consumption for anabolic processes. Nevertheless, the range of compounds that can be produced as sole end product of a fermentative process is limited, since the average oxidation state of substrate and products has to be identical in the absence of an external electron acceptor. This limitation could be overcome by the transfer of the surplus of electrons to a poised electrode surface, which of note is the only known anaerobic electron acceptor that cannot be depleted. In the first genetic engineering step, deletion mutants were developed that are devoid of either one, two, or all three prophages in their genome with the aim to construct a more stable chassis strain for microbe-electrode interaction, due to less prophage induced cell lysis (Gödeke et al., 2011). Current production in a bioelectrochemical system together with the analysis of cells on the anode surface were used as surrogate for the stability assessment. The λ-prophage deletion mutant produced overall 1.34fold more current (6.7 µA cm-2 ) than the wild type and all other constructed strains and showed with 1.1 × 1011 cells the highest cell density on the anode surface (2.3fold more than the wild type). The strain was further modified to contain codon optimized versions of acetolactate synthase and acetolactate decarboxylase derived from Bacillus subtilis. This allowed for the production of a mixture of acetoin and acetate from lactate in an almost 0.4:1 ratio. Further process improvement was reached by the deletion of the acetate kinase and phosphotransacetylase genes ackA/pta. The acetoin yield increased in this mutant from 40 to 86% of the theoretical maximum and acetoin was the only detectable end product. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2017;114: 1283-1289. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.