Development of microbial cell factories for the production of chito-oligosaccharides

Chito-oligosaccharides have garnered ample interest for promising applications in various domains ranging from health care to agriculture. However, the considerable product dispersity obtained with todays’ production technologies severely hampers the exploitation of their application potential, as these applications likely rely on stringent structure/function relationships. To this day, the developed biotechnological alternatives, which have the potential to yield such high purity products by employing highly specific chitin synthases and deacetylases, neither achieved the desired product characteristics. In response, we developed an efficient Escherichia coli-based platform for the production of a portfolio of pure and well-defined chito-oligosaccharides (Figure 1). To this end, E. coli was massively tuned by integrating metabolic engineering and synthetic biology with a view to i) increasing product yield and productivity, ii) improving product purity, and iii) expanding the library of chito-oligosaccharides produced in vivo