Expression of phenylalanine ammonia lyase as an intracellularly free and extracellularly cell surface-immobilized enzyme on a gut microbe as a live biotherapeutic for phenylketonuria

Phenylketonuria(PKU),a disease resulting in the disability to degrade phenylalanine(Phe)is an inborn error with a 1 in 10,000 morbidity rate on average around the world which leads to neurotoxicity.As an potential alternative to a protein-restricted diet,oral intake of engineered probiotics degrading Phe inside the body is a promising treatment,currently at clinical stage II(Isabella,et al.,2018).However,limited transmembrane transport of Phe is a bottleneck to further improvement of the probiotic’s activity.Here,we achieved simultaneous degradation of Phe both intracellularly and extracellularly by expressing genes encoding the Phe-metabolizing enzyme phenylalanine ammonia lyase(PAL)as an intracellularly free and a cell surface-immobilized enzyme in Escherichia coli Nissle 1917(EcN)which overcomes the transportation problem.The metabolic engineering strategy was also combined with strengthening of Phe transportation,transportation of PAL-catalyzed trans-cinnamic acid and fixation of released ammonia.Administration of our final synthetic strain TYS8500 with PAL both displayed on the cell surface and expressed inside the cell to the Pah^(F263S)PKU mouse model reduced blood Phe concentration by 44.4%compared to the control Ec N,independent of dietary protein intake.TYS8500 shows great potential in future applications for PKU therapy.