Manufacturing Multienzymatic Complex Reactors In Vivo by Self-Assembly To Improve the Biosynthesis of Itaconic Acid in Escherichia coli

The self-assembly of multienzyme into bioreactors is of extensive interest to spatially regulate valuable reactions. Despite the important progresses achieved, methods to precisely manufacture multienzymatic complex reactors (MECRs) are still poorly proposed both in vivo and in vitro, particularly for more than three biocatalytically relevant enzymes. Here, we developed a sequential self-assembly system to form multitude MECRs involving three enzymes in the itaconic acid (IA) pathway with two pairs of protein-peptide interactions. The MECRs were identified as nanoscale particle-like structures when self-assembled in vitro and produced higher IA production than the unassembled and linearly assembled systems when applied in vivo coupling with CRISPR-Cas9 based metabolic engineering. This work provides novel insights into the construction of multifarious multienzyme complex into bioreactors by the self-assembly strategy for multistep cascades to sequentially control metabolic fluxes inside cells.