High-titer 2-phenylethanol production in Escherichia coli via decarboxylation-step optimization and a vegetable-oil overlay for biocompatible in situ recovery

2-phenylethanol (2-PE) is a high-value aromatic alcohol. Its bioproduction is limited by pathway bottlenecks, limited by a rate-limiting decarboxylation step, product toxicity, and volatilization. We sought to build an efficient Escherichia coli (E. coli) platform by optimizing the segment of the Ehrlich route that converts L-phenylalanine (L-Phe) to 2-PE, together with a food-grade soybean-oil overlay for in situ product recovery (ISPR). Whole-cell assays showed that phenylpyruvate decarboxylation was the main bottleneck when the yeast decarboxylase Aro10 was used. A phylogeny-guided screen identified Lactococcus lactis KivD as a superior substitute in E. coli. After replacing Aro10 with KivD and tuning expression, leveraging endogenous glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) for NAD(P)H recycling enabled sufficient cofactor regeneration, yielding 49.5 mM 2-PE from 50 mM L-Phe with 99.0% conversion. At the shake-flask scale, a fed-batch L-Phe feeding strategy coupled with a 2:1 soybean-oil overlay for in situ product removal reduced toxicity and volatilization losses, producing 130 mM 2-PE (15.9 g/L). Using soybean oil as an ISPR phase effectively sequestered 2-PE from the aqueous phase, minimizing volatilization and increasing the overall recovered yield to 94.2% based on L-Phe consumption. Replacing the rate-limiting decarboxylation step with KivD, balancing redox through cofactor recycling, and coupling the pathway to a mild oil-overlay recovery increased flux and enabled high-titer 2-PE in E. coli. The workflow of bottleneck substitution plus biocompatible in situ recovery can be transferred to related aromatic alcohols and provides a foundation for de novo routes and high-cell-density fermentations that target still higher titers.