In order to further characterize the engineered strain 13C flux analysis was used, in which the intracellular fluxes are fitted towards the measured external metabolites and the labeling pattern of amino-acids, which was determined by GC-MS.
As this method is limited to measuring de-novo synthesized amino-acids, intracellular fluxes could only be determined
during the exponential growth phase.
In order to obtain labeled samples from exponentially grown cells, shake-flask cultivations were performed and samples were taken after 7.5h of cultivation.
In order to be able to fit the fluxes with special respect to organic acids, a compartmentalized flux model needed to be constructed. As the existing A. oryzae flux model was not compartmentalized, an A. niger model was extended by the
reductive TCA branch in the cytosol.
The so calculated fluxes show an increase of carbon flow through the rTCA branch in the cytosol and an increased flux of malate and oxaloacetate into the mitochondrion, in order to fuel the TCA cycle (Figure 13).
These results show that the overexpression of the rTCA branch already has an impact on the malate production during the exponential growth phase and allows increased malate production compared to the wild-type during cellular growth.
Though the efficiency of this strain is not optimal during the growth phase, the parallel growth and increased production allows foruse of the engineered strain even in a continuous process.
Thereby carbon containing waste streams could be used for the production of renewable chemicals.
Taken together, this strain allows for high level production of malic acid from both, glucose and xylose.
Therefore it is very well suited for the biorefinery of the future. Though it already performs very well concerning malic acid production, it might still be optimized through metabolic engineering. One example might be the engineering of the pyruvate carboxylase step, which still seems to be a flux controlling step.