INTRODUCTION
Limonene, the major component of citrus peel oil, has a variety of industrial and microbiological applications. Its antimicrobial properties make it a popular component of disinfectants and food preservatives and an environmentally friendly solvent used at the industrial scale (
1–4). More recently, limonene or its hydrogenated forms have been identified to be potential jet fuel components (
5–7). As such, the anticipation of a greater global demand for limonene has provided significant motivation for the renewable production of this compound from plant biomass through a microbial process (
8–10), and recent efforts to optimize production have resulted in titers of over 400 mg/liter at the bench scale (
11). In this context, the toxicity of limonene to the microbial host presents a major challenge, as the accumulation of toxic products limits growth and metabolic activity.
Curiously, the toxicity of limonene has been reported to be significantly higher than that of other monoterpenes or solvents with similar hydrophobicities (
12,
13), suggesting that this acute toxicity is due to something other than its solvent-like properties. However, molecular-level studies of limonene toxicity in microbes are limited. While several studies in
Escherichia coli have noted an impact of limonene on lipid composition (
14) and suggested a role for reactive oxygen species (ROS) (
15), no specific hypothesis for how limonene causes these cellular perturbations has been proposed.
In this work, we investigated the basis of limonene toxicity in the model Gram-negative bacterium E. coli. We identified a mutant with significantly enhanced tolerance to limonene and show that the majority of the toxicity in wild-type (WT) cells is due not to limonene itself but to a common oxidation product of limonene, limonene hydroperoxide.
DISCUSSION
The toxicity of limonene to
E. coli has been somewhat enigmatic. The working assumption for the toxicity of organic solvents is that they work largely by disrupting the cell membrane, which in turn interferes with a variety of processes, such as respiration, transport, and maintenance of ion gradients (
28). Under this model, the toxicity is largely a function of the compound's hydrophobicity, and several studies have shown the inverse correlation between toxicity and the log octanol-water partition coefficient (
POW), a measure of hydrophobicity (
29). However, limonene is significantly more toxic than other solvents in the same log
POW range and very closely related compounds, like pinene (
12,
13). In this work, we show that this is most likely due to the presence of the limonene oxidation product limonene hydroperoxide as a contaminant of limonene.
A key finding in our study is that limonene hydroperoxide is likely to be present in most laboratory limonene stocks, as we observed that significant hydroperoxide formation and associated toxicity appeared within several weeks of routine handling of limonene bottles. Special care, such as storage under anaerobic conditions, appears to be required for limonene if it is used for toxicity studies. Ideally, chemical manufacturers should also be encouraged to store and ship limonene sparged with an inert gas. With the recent interest in the mechanism of limonene toxicity in microbes (
14,
15,
30,
31), it is critical to ensure that the toxicity attributed to limonene is not in fact due to limonene hydroperoxide. Our findings suggest that nonoxidized limonene has effects similar to those of other solvents in the same log
POW range. These solvents have relatively little effect on wild-type
E. coli, although they are highly toxic to cells with an impaired efflux capability, such as the cells of Δ
acrA or Δ
acrB strains (
13). The AcrAB-TolC efflux pump is particularly critical for compounds with a log
POW in the range of 3.9 to 5.5 (
29); thus, it is not surprising that limonene, with a log
POW of approximately 4.1, is efficiently effluxed by AcrAB-TolC.
The AhpC
L177Q protein, discovered in a strain of
E. coli that evolved on medium containing limonene and, presumably, limonene hydroperoxide, appears to be highly efficient at reducing limonene hydroperoxide to a less toxic product. Given the increased sensitivity of the Δ
ahpC mutant, wild-type AhpC likely has some minimal activity against limonene hydroperoxide, but the activity is greatly enhanced by the L177Q mutation. Analysis of the protein structure could illuminate the effect of the mutation, and the structure of
E. coli AhpC was recently solved by X-ray crystallography to a 3.3-Å resolution (
32). Unfortunately, the C-terminal tail, which includes the L177 residue, could not be resolved in the structure. However, L177 is likely to be located close to the active site at C166, and the structure is consistent with the C-terminal tail being involved in substrate recognition. An alternative, though unlikely, scenario is that the L177Q mutation generally increases AhpC activity against a variety of substrates. Further
in vitro studies with AhpC
L177Q and other mutant versions of AhpC would be necessary to resolve these questions.
We were mildly surprised to find that AhpC
L177Q was equally efficient in a wild-type and a Δ
ahpC strain background (
Fig. 1B), since AhpC forms a decamer in its functional form (
32,
33) and the mutation was originally isolated in a strain with only the single
ahpCL177Q allele. This strongly suggests that the heteromer is functional, which would be consistent with the fact that each decamer has 10 independent substrate-accessible active sites. Alternatively, very small quantities of homomeric AhpC
L177Q may be sufficient for activity, which would also be consistent with our findings that even very low (leaky) expression of AhpC
L177Q is sufficient for tolerance and no increase in tolerance is associated with higher levels of expression (see Fig. S3 in the supplemental material).
Although the oxidation of limonene to limonene hydroperoxide was observed half a century ago (
34,
35), there is a limited body of literature on the biological properties of limonene hydroperoxide. A large fraction of this literature focuses on the allergenic properties of limonene, which were shown to be due to limonene hydroperoxide (
25,
36–38). This direct parallel to bacterial toxicity suggests a general cellular damage mechanism for limonene hydroperoxide. In general, hydroperoxides, like other reactive oxygen species, cause oxidative damage to a variety of cellular macromolecules, such as DNA, proteins, and lipids (
39). Lipid peroxidation could be particularly relevant in the case of limonene hydroperoxide, as the hydrophobic limonene moiety is likely to insert into the membrane.
Metabolic engineering of microbes for production of fuels and commodity chemicals has been challenging, and the toxicity of the final product is thought to be a major impediment to increasing production titers (
40). In the specific case of microbial production of limonene, our findings are very encouraging, as they suggest that the limonene produced inside the cell will not be highly toxic, as long as it is efficiently secreted. Consistent with this, expression of AhpC
L177Q did not confer any significant improvement in limonene production in 24- to 72-h batch cultures of engineered
E. coli (see Fig. S4 in the supplemental material). However, industrial fermentations can last several weeks or more, and we observed significant limonene oxidation to limonene hydroperoxide on this time scale. While a scaled-up production process would be tailored toward preventing significant product oxidation, even small quantities of the hydroperoxide could be toxic, and the use of strains not subject to this toxicity would be preferred. Since strains expressing AhpC
L177Q showed no obvious defects in growth or metabolism, they are excellent candidates for use in microbial limonene production processes at the industrial scale. Furthermore, the
ahpCL177Q mutation appeared after only a few days of growth under the stress condition, and it is possible that even more tolerant strains could be obtained by continued laboratory evolution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work, conducted by the Joint BioEnergy Institute, was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. F.M. was supported by Total New Energies USA, Inc., Emeryville, CA, as part of a joint project between the Joint BioEnergy Institute and Total New Energies USA, Inc.
We thank Heather Szmidt-Middleton for help with initial strain archiving and testing and Margaret Brown and Tristan de Rond for other technical assistance and helpful discussions.
J.D.K. has financial interests in Amyris and Lygos.