Patent ID: 7794988

Claim:
A method for producing an L-amino acid comprising: I) cultivating an L-amino acid-producing Escherichia coli bacterium in a medium, and II) collecting said L-amino acid from the medium, wherein said bacterium has been modified to attenuate expression of the rspAB operon by a method selected from the group consisting of: A) deleting a part of the rspAB operon, B) shifting the reading frame of the rspAB operon, C) introducing one or more missense and/or nonsense mutations into the rspAB operon, D) modifying a region that is adjacent to the rspAB operon which controls gene expression, and E) combinations thereof; and wherein the rspAB operon comprises the rspA and rspB genes, and wherein the rspA and rspB genes encode proteins having at least 95% homology to the amino acid sequence of SEQ ID NO: 2 and SEQ ID NO: 4, respectively.