Inhibition of E. coli Host RNA Polymerase Allows Efficient Extracellular Recombinant Protein Production by Enhancing Outer Membrane Leakiness

With the growing interest in continuous cultivation of Escherichia coli, secretion of product to the medium is not only a benefit, but a necessity in future bioprocessing. In this study, it is shown that induced decoupling of growth and heterologous gene expression in the E. coli X‐press strain (derived from BL21(DE3)) facilitates extracellular recombinant protein production. The effect of the process parameters temperature and specific glucose consumption rate (qS) on growth, productivity, lysis and leakiness, is investigated, to find the parameter space allowing extracellular protein production. Two model proteins are used, Protein A (SpA) and a heavy‐chain single‐domain antibody (VHH), and performance is compared to the industrial standard strain BL21(DE3). It is shown that inducible growth repression in the X‐press strain greatly mitigates the effect of metabolic burden under different process conditions. Furthermore, temperature and qS are used to control productivity and leakiness. In the X‐press strain, extracellular SpA and VHH titer reach up to 349 and 19.6 mg g−1, respectively, comprising up to 90% of the total soluble product, while keeping cell lysis at a minimum. The findings demonstrate that the X‐press strain constitutes a valuable host for extracellular production of recombinant protein with E. coli. Controllable leakiness of the E. coli outer membrane can simplify downstream processing. In this study, it is shown that induced repression of the host RNA polymerase in E. coli X‐press leads to efficient product leakage and that leakiness can be controlled via temperature and specific substrate uptake rate. The X‐press strain constitutes a promising platform for extracellular protein production.