Systems and Synthetic Biology Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology Daejeon, South Korea.
Front Microbiol. 2013 Apr 19;4:92. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2013.00092. eCollection 2013.
The finite reservation of fossil fuels accelerates the necessity of development of renewable energy sources. Recent advances in synthetic biology encompassing systems biology and metabolic engineering enable us to engineer and/or create tailor made microorganisms to produce alternative biofuels for the future bio-era. For the efficient transformation of biomass to bioenergy, microbial cells need to be designed and engineered to maximize the performance of cellular metabolisms for the production of biofuels during energy flow. Toward this end, two different conceptual approaches have been applied for the development of platform cell factories: forward minimization and reverse engineering. From the context of naturally minimized genomes,non-essential energy-consuming pathways and/or related gene clusters could be progressively deleted to optimize cellular energy status for bioenergy production. Alternatively, incorporation of non-indigenous parts and/or modules including biomass-degrading enzymes, carbon uptake transporters, photosynthesis, CO2 fixation, and etc. into chassis microorganisms allows the platform cells to gain novel metabolic functions for bioenergy. This review focuses on the current progress in synthetic biology-aided pathway engineering in microbial cells and discusses its impact on the production of sustainable bioenergy.
化石燃料的有限储备加速了可再生能源发展的必要性。合成生物学领域的最新进展包括系统生物学和代谢工程，使我们能够设计和/或创造定制的微生物，为未来的生物时代生产替代生物燃料。为了将生物质高效转化为生物能，微生物细胞需要进行设计和工程改造，以最大限度地提高细胞代谢在能量流过程中生产生物燃料的性能。为此，已经应用了两种不同的概念方法来开发平台细胞工厂：正向最小化和反向工程。从自然最小化基因组的角度来看，可以逐步删除不必要的耗能途径和/或相关基因簇，以优化细胞的能量状态，用于生物能源生产。或者，将非本土的部分和/或模块（包括生物质降解酶、碳摄取转运蛋白、光合作用、CO2 固定等）整合到底盘微生物中，使平台细胞获得用于生物能源的新代谢功能。本综述重点介绍了合成生物学辅助微生物细胞途径工程的最新进展，并讨论了其对可持续生物能源生产的影响。
