Tokyo Institute of Technology · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Professor Takashi Hirasawa's research lab focuses on microbial physiology and systems biology, particularly in *Corynebacterium glutamicum*, a key industrial microorganism. The lab investigates metabolic engineering and adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) to enhance microbial cell factories for efficient amino acid production. By integrating multi-omics approaches—genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics—the lab uncovers molecular mechanisms underlying stress tolerance, metabolic regulation, and industrial trait improvement. Their work bridges fundamental microbiology with biotechnological applications, aiming to optimize microbial strains for sustainable bioproduction.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) is a useful experimental methodology for fundamental scientific research and industrial applications to create microbial cell factories. By using ALE, cells are adapted to the environment that researchers set based on their objectives through the serial transfer of cell populations in batch cultivations or continuous cultures and the fitness of the cells (i.e., cell growth) under such an environment increases. Then, omics analyses of the evolved mutants, inclu
The Corynebacterium glutamicum mutant KY9714, originally isolated as a lysozyme-sensitive mutant, does not grow at 37 degrees C. Complementation tests and DNA sequencing analysis revealed that a mutation in a single gene of 1,920 bp, ltsA (lysozyme and temperature sensitive), was responsible for its lysozyme sensitivity and temperature sensitivity. The ltsA gene encodes a protein homologous to the glutamine-dependent asparagine synthetases of various organisms, but it could not rescue the aspara
Corynebacterium glutamicum is known for its ability to produce glutamic acid and has been utilized for the fermentative production of various amino acids. Glutamic acid production in C. glutamicum is induced by penicillin. In this study, the transcriptome and metabolome of C. glutamicum is analyzed to understand the mechanism of penicillin-induced glutamic acid production. Transcriptomic analysis with DNA microarray revealed that expression of some glycolysis- and TCA cycle-related genes, which
These results indicate that a defect caused by the ltsA mutations is responsible for temperature-sensitive growth and L-glutamate overproduction by C. glutamicum. The two temperature-resistant mutants seem to carry suppressor mutations that rendered cells temperature-resistance and abolished L-glutamate overproduction.
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