Construction and Expression of the Soybean Isoflavonoid Biosynthetic Pathway in Escherichia coli

The natural isoflavones biosynthetic pathway is only limited in legumes plant. To study the isoflavone in bacteria by metabolic engineering requires transformation of multi-gene of the whole pathway into the host strain to resembling the expression and metabolism of the genes. The multi-gene transformation and expression strategy become necessary because of this. This article talks about the multi-gene transformation strategy using one or many vectors, taking the five genes of isoflavonoid biosynthetic pathway to E. coli. The recombinant bacteria carry five genes with two vectors, the whole Isoflavonoid biosynthetic pathway was constructed into E. coli. Fermented with L-tyrosine as substrate and IPTG as an inducer, the recombinant bacteria can produce a new isoflavone related metabolite showed on HPLC analysis profile.