Improving N-glycosylation efficiency in Escherichia coli using shotgun proteomics, metabolic network analysis, and selective reaction monitoring

Recently, the prospect of using Escherichia coli as a host for human glycoprotein production has increased due to detailed characterization of the prokaryotic N-glycosylation process and the ability to transfer the system into this bacterium. Although functionality of the native Campylobacter jejuni N-glycosylation system in E. coli has been demonstrated, the efficiency of the process using the well-characterized C. jejuni glycoprotein AcrA, was found to be low at 13.4±0.9% of total extracted protein. A combined approach using isobaric labeling of peptides and probability-based network analysis of metabolic changes was applied to forward engineer E. coli to improve glycosylation efficiency of AcrA. Enhancing flux through the glyoxylate cycle was identified as a potential metabolic manipulation to improve modification efficiency and was achieved by increasing the expression of isocitrate lyase. While the overall recombinant protein titre did not change significantly, the amount of glycosylated protein increased by approximately 300%.