초록
<P><B>Background</B></P><P>A microbial cell factory with high yield and productivity are prerequisites for an economically feasible bio-based chemical industry. However, cell factories that show a kinetic imbalance between glycolysis and product formation pathways are not optimal. Glycolysis activity is highly robust for survival in nature, but is not optimized for chemical production.</P><P><B>Results</B></P><P>Here, we propose a novel approach to balance glycolytic activity with the product formation capacity by precisely controlling expression level of <I>ptsG</I> (encoded glucose transporter) through UTR engineering. For various heterologous pathways with different maximum production rates, e.g., <I>n</I>-butanol, butyrate, and 2,3-butanediol, glycolytic fluxes could be successfully modulated to maximize yield and productivity, while minimizing by-product formation in <I>Escherichia coli</I>.</P><P><B>Conclusions</B></P><P>These results support the application of this simple method to explore the maximum yield and productivity when designing optimal cell factories for value-added products in the fields of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.</P><P><B>Electronic supplementary material</B></P><P>The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-017-0847-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.</P>