Microbial Production of 3-Hydroxypropionaldehyde from Glycerol Bioconversion

3-Hydroxypropionaldehyde (3-HPA) is of high industrial interest as a new platform intermediate from bioconversion of renewable materials because it can be converted into a number of large scale commodity chemicals. In this work we studied the production of 3-HPA from bioconversion of glycerol in a two-stage process. In the first stage active biomass is produced. The active biomass is then used for the production of 3-HPA in a second stage by biotransformation with the help of semicarbazide to trap 3-HPA from the culture. First we optimized the conditions for active biomass production for the biotransformation in the second step. By using a fed-batch process with proper feeding of semicarbazide and supplementary addition of active biomass we reached a final concentration of 54 g/l 3-HPA with a yield of 97 % (mol/mol). This represents the highest 3-HPA concentration and yield reported so far for the microbial production of 3-HPA from glycerol.