Ma Xiaoyan, Huo Yi-Xin
College of Life Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, 5 South Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing, 100081, China.
Synth Syst Biotechnol. 2016 Oct 11;1(3):137-142. doi: 10.1016/j.synbio.2016.09.004. eCollection 2016 Sep.
The process of metabolic engineering consists of multiple cycles of design, build, test and learn, which is typically laborious and time-consuming. To increase the efficiency and the rate of success of strain engineering, novel instrumentation must be applied. Microfluidics, the control of liquid flow in microstructures, has enabled flexible, accurate, automatic, and high-throughput manipulation of cells in liquid at picoliter to nanoliter scale. These attributes hold great promise in advancing metabolic engineering in terms of the phases of design, build, test and learn. To promote the application of microfluidic-based technologies in strain improvement, this review addressed the potentials of microfluidics and the related approaches in DNA assembly, transformation, strain screening, genotyping and phenotyping, and highlighted their adaptations for single-cell analysis. As a result, this facilitates in-depth understanding of the metabolic network, which in turn promote efficient optimization in the following cycles of strain engineering. Taken together, microfluidic-based technologies enable on-chip workflow, and could greatly accelerate the turnaround of metabolic engineering.
代谢工程过程由设计、构建、测试和学习的多个循环组成，这通常既费力又耗时。为提高菌株工程的效率和成功率，必须应用新型仪器。微流体技术，即对微结构中液体流动的控制，能够在皮升至纳升尺度上对液体中的细胞进行灵活、精确、自动且高通量的操作。这些特性在代谢工程的设计、构建、测试和学习阶段具有巨大的发展潜力。为促进基于微流体技术在菌株改良中的应用，本综述探讨了微流体技术及相关方法在DNA组装、转化、菌株筛选、基因分型和表型分析方面的潜力，并强调了它们在单细胞分析中的应用。因此，这有助于深入理解代谢网络，进而在后续的菌株工程循环中促进高效优化。综上所述，基于微流体的技术实现了芯片上的工作流程，并能极大地加快代谢工程的进程。
