Abstract: Corynebacterium glutamicum is a traditional industrial microorganism. In order to study the influence of ethanol on the expression of exogenous protein in Corynebacterium glutamicum, the strain that can constitutively express the enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) was inoculated into the culture medium containing different concentrations of ethanol, and it was found that the unit fluorescence intensity could be significantly elevated in the process of the utilization of low concentration (1%) ethanol. Here we also demonstrated that ethanol had better performances both in cell growth and protein production compared with several common nutrients. In addition, an auto-inducible expression vector with high expression ability and inducible rate was constructed according to the strong induction of the isocitrate lyase (ICL) in the presence of ethanol utilization.

Key words: Corynebacterium glutamicum, ethanol, protein expression, carbon source