Growth-dependent recombinant product formation kinetics can be reproduced through engineering of glucose transport and is prone to phenotypic heterogeneity.

We have demonstrated that reduction on glucose consumption rate in E. coli leads to an improvement of GFP production. Furthermore, from the perspective of phenotypic heterogeneity, we observed in this case that heterogeneous systems are also the ones leading to the highest performance. This observation suggests reconsidering the generally accepted proposition stating that phenotypic heterogeneity is generally unwanted in bioprocess applications.