ABSTRACT
There is growing interest in biodiesel and this results in the accumulation of glycerol. The exploitation and application of glycerol has attracted more and more attention. In the current study, glycerol was biotransformed to produce 3-hydroxypropionaldehyde by genetic engineering bacteria. It is known that 3-hydroxypopionaldehyde has been widely used as an important intermediate for chemicals, effective antimicrobial agent, and fix agent for tissues. A pair of primers was designed on the basis of the sequence of both NH2-terminus and the amino acid sequence of glycerol dehydratase reported by NCBI, and a fragment about 1.6 kb was obtained by PCR amplification using the total genome DNA of Lactobacillus reuteri as template, then the fragment was cloned to the pMD18-T vector and sequenced. Two specific primers were designed according to the obtained sequence, and a fragment with length of 1674 bp was amplified using PCR with these two specific primers. Consequently, the resulting products were digested with EcoR I and Hind III and ligated using T4 DNA ligase to the pET28b vector digested with the same enzymes. The recombinant plasmid, named pET28b-dhaB, was transformed into E. coli BL21. The positive clones were induced with IPTG and the expression products were further analyzed by SDS-PAGE, indicating that protein with a molecule weight of around 65 kD was obtained. Furthermore, the glycerol dehydratase activity was evaluated and compared with the wild type strain as well.