Ribulose Monophosphate Shunt Provides Nearly All Biomass and Energy Required for Growth of E. coli.

The ribulose monophosphate (RuMP) cycle is a highly efficient route for the assimilation of reduced one-carbon compounds. Despite considerable research, the RuMP cycle has not been fully implemented in model biotechnological organisms such as Escherichia coli, mainly since the heterologous establishment of the pathway requires addressing multiple challenges: sufficient formaldehyde production, efficient formaldehyde assimilation, and sufficient regeneration of the formaldehyde acceptor, ribulose 5-phosphate. Here, by efficiently producing formaldehyde from sarcosine oxidation and ribulose 5-phosphate from exogenous xylose, we set aside two of these concerns, allowing us to focus on the particular challenge of establishing efficient formaldehyde assimilation via the RuMP shunt, the linear variant of the RuMP cycle. We have generated deletion strains whose growth depends, to different extents, on the activity of the RuMP shunt, thus incrementally increasing the selection pressure for the activity of the synthetic pathway. Our final strain depends on the activity of the RuMP shunt for providing the cell with almost all biomass and energy needs, presenting an absolute coupling between growth and activity of key RuMP cycle components. This study shows the value of a stepwise problem solving approach when establishing a difficult but promising pathway, and is a strong basis for future engineering, selection, and evolution of model organisms for growth via the RuMP cycle.