Development of a high-efficiency N-acetylneuraminic acid production platform through multi-pathway synergistic engineering.

Abstract

The growing demand for N-acetylneuraminic acid (NeuAc) has driven the need for efficient and environmentally sustainable biomanufacturing processes. Microbial fermentation offers a promising route, yet optimizing cell factories with excellent phenotypes remains challenging. Here, we engineered Escherichia coli to enable high-efficiency co-utilization of glucose and glycerol. We refactored two synthetic pathways with the same start and end to enhance N-acetylmannosamine (ManNAc) precursor levels and optimized NeuAc synthase using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and machine learning (ML) sequence mining. Subsequently, phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP) levels were boosted by capturing carbon flow from competing regeneration pathways, thus balancing the intracellular PEP:ManNAc ratio for improved NeuAc synthesis. Besides glucose, an additional carbon inlet from glycerol was opened, achieving a NeuAc titer of 70.4 g/l in fed-batch fermentation with a productivity of 1.17 g/l/h. This work demonstrates a highly efficient microbial cell factory for the biosynthesis of NeuAc and provides a versatile system engineering strategy applicable to other high-value compounds.