초록
<P>The pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) plays an important role in the synthesis of ribonucleotides and aromatic amino acids. During bioethanol production from cellulosic biomass composed mainly of <SMALL>D</SMALL>-glucose and <SMALL>D</SMALL>-xylose, the PPP is also involved in xylose metabolism by engineered <I>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</I>. Although the activities and thermostabilities of the four PPP enzymes (transaldolase: <I>TAL1</I>, transketolase: <I>TKL1</I>, ribose-5-phosphate ketol-isomerase: <I>RKI1</I> and <SMALL>D</SMALL>-ribulose-5-phosphate 3-epimerase: <I>RPE1</I>) can affect the efficiency of cellulosic ethanol production at high temperatures, little is known about the suitable expression levels of these PPP genes. Here, we overexpressed PPP genes from <I>S. cerevisiae</I> and the thermotolerant yeast <I>Kluyveromyces marxianus</I> either singly or in combination in recombinant yeast strains harboring a mutant of xylose isomerase (XI) and evaluated xylose consumption and ethanol production of these yeast transformants in glucose/xylose mixed media at 36 °C. Among the PPP genes examined, we found that: (1) strains that overexpressed <I>S. cerevisiae TKL1</I> exhibited the highest rate of xylose consumption relative to strains that overexpressed other PPP genes alone; (2) overexpression of <I>RKI1</I> and <I>TAL1</I> derived from <I>K. marxianus</I> with <I>S. cerevisiae TKL1</I> increased the xylose consumption rate by 1.87-fold at 24 h relative to the control strain (from 0.55 to 1.03 g/L/h); (3) the strains with XI showed higher ethanol yield than strains with xylose reductase and xylitol dehydrogenase and (4) <I>PHO13</I> disruption did not improve xylose assimilation under the experimental conditions. Together these results indicated that optimization of PPP activity improves xylose metabolism in genetically engineered yeast strains, which could be useful for commercial production of ethanol from cellulosic material.</P><P><B>Electronic supplementary material</B></P><P>The online version of this article (10.1186/s13568-018-0670-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.</P>