Synthetic biology promises to simplify the construction of metabolic pathways by assembling the de- tached modules of the whole pathway. This gives new approaches for the microbial production of industrial products such as polyhydroxyalkanoates （PHA）. In this study, to produce poly（3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyhexanoate） （PHBHHx） by Pseudomonas stutzeri 1317 from unrelated carbon sources such as glucose, the phaCl-phaZ-phaC2 operon of P. stutzeri 1317 was knocked out to generate the PHA deficient mutant P. stutzeri 1317LF. Then three modules containing phaCahAReBRe, phaCahBReGep and phaCAhPah were introduced into P. stutzeri 1317LF separately The shake flask results indicated that the precursor supply and PHA synthase activity were the vital factors for the PHBHHx accumulation of P. stutzeri 1317LF. Furthermore, the PHBHHx accumulation of the recombinants from different carbon resources were performed. The highest PHBHHx content was 23.7% （by mass） with 58.6% （by mole） 3HB fraction. These results provide basis for further improving the PHBHHx accumulation of P. stutzeri from unrelated carbon sources.
Allele-specific expression refers to the preferential expression of one of the two alleles in a diploid genome, which has been thought largely attributable to the associated cis-element variation and allele-specific epigenetic modification patterns. Allele-specific expression may contribute to the heterosis （or hybrid vigor） effect in hybrid plants that are produced from crosses of closely-related species, subspecies and/or inbred lines. In this study, using Illumina high-throughput sequencing of maize transcriptomics, chromatic H3K27me3 histone modification and DNA methylation data, we developed a new computational framework to identify allele-specifically expressed genes by simul- taneously tracking allele-specific gene expression patterns and the epigenetic modification landscape in the seedling tissues of hybrid maize. This approach relies on detecting nucleotide polymorphisms and any genomic structural variation between two parental genomes in order to distinguish pater- nally or maternally derived sequencing reads. This computational pipeline also incorporates a mod- ified Chi-square test to statistically identify allele-specific gene expression and epigenetic modification based on the Poisson distribution.
