3,4-dihydroxybutanoic acid

Biosynthetic Pathway of 3,4-Dihydroxybutanoic Acid in Engineered Escherichia Coli

Gao, Haijun, et al. Bioresource technology, 2017, 245, 794-800.

3,4-Dihydroxybutanoic acid (3,4-DHBA) is a platform four-carbon (C4) compound that can be used as a precursor to several of the chemicals most important to the commercial industry: antibiotics, chiral molecules, HIV inhibitors, cholesterol-lowering chirals, etc.
This is a dual substrate biosynthetic system for the generation of 3,4-DHBA using a synthetic pathway constructed in engineered E.coli, where synthetic substrate is xylose and growth substrate is glucose.
More precisely, the new approach for synthesising 3,4-DHBA from xylose and glucose via a reengineered Weimberg pathway heterologously expressed in engineered E. coli was developed. The pathway requires four or five reaction steps namely dehydrogenation, dehydration, decarboxylation and oxidation, each of which was catalyzed by a xylose dehydrogenase, a xylonate dehydratase, a 2-keto acid decarboxylase and an ALDH or a coenzyme A-acylating aldehyde dehydrogenase (CoA-acylating ALDH) with a thiolase.