Overproduction of L‐tryptophan via simultaneous feed of glucose and anthranilic acid from recombinant Escherichia coli W3110: Kinetic modeling and process scale‐up

L-tryptophan is an essential amino acid widely used in food and pharmaceutical industries. However, its production via Escherichia coli fermentation suffers severely from both low glucose conversion efficiency and acetic acid inhibition, and to date effective process control methods have rarely been explored to facilitate its industrial scale production. To resolve these challenges, in the current research an engineered strain of E. coli was used to overproduce L-tryptophan. To achieve this, a novel dynamic control strategy which incorporates an optimized anthranilic acid feeding into a dissolved oxygen-stat (DO-stat) glucose feeding framework was proposed for the first time. Three original contributions were observed. Firstly, compared to previous DO control methods, the current strategy was able to inhibit completely the production of acetic acid, and its glucose to L-tryptophan yield reached 0.211 g/g, 62.3% higher than the previously reported. Secondly, a rigorous kinetic model was constructed to simulate the underlying biochemical process and identify the effect of anthranilic acid on both glucose conversion and L-tryptophan synthesis. Finally, a thorough investigation was conducted to testify the capability of both the kinetic model and the novel control strategy for process scale-up. It was found that the model possesses great predictive power, and the presented strategy achieved the highest glucose to L-tryptophan yield (0.224 g/g) ever reported in large scale processes, which approaches the theoretical maximum yield of 0.227 g/g. This research, therefore, paves the way to significantly enhance the profitability of the investigated bioprocess.