Santos-Merino María, Singh Amit K, Ducat Daniel C
MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States.
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States.
Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2019 Feb 27;7:33. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2019.00033. eCollection 2019.
Cyanobacteria are promising microorganisms for sustainable biotechnologies, yet unlocking their potential requires radical re-engineering and application of cutting-edge synthetic biology techniques. In recent years, the available devices and strategies for modifying cyanobacteria have been increasing, including advances in the design of genetic promoters, ribosome binding sites, riboswitches, reporter proteins, modular vector systems, and markerless selection systems. Because of these new toolkits, cyanobacteria have been successfully engineered to express heterologous pathways for the production of a wide variety of valuable compounds. Cyanobacterial strains with the potential to be used in real-world applications will require the refinement of genetic circuits used to express the heterologous pathways and development of accurate models that predict how these pathways can be best integrated into the larger cellular metabolic network. Herein, we review advances that have been made to translate synthetic biology tools into cyanobacterial model organisms and summarize experimental and strategies that have been employed to increase their bioproduction potential. Despite the advances in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering during the last years, it is clear that still further improvements are required if cyanobacteria are to be competitive with heterotrophic microorganisms for the bioproduction of added-value compounds.
蓝细菌是可持续生物技术中很有前景的微生物，然而要释放它们的潜力，需要进行彻底的重新设计并应用前沿的合成生物学技术。近年来，用于改造蓝细菌的可用装置和策略不断增加，包括基因启动子、核糖体结合位点、核糖开关、报告蛋白、模块化载体系统和无标记选择系统设计方面的进展。由于这些新的工具包，蓝细菌已被成功改造，以表达用于生产多种有价值化合物的异源途径。有潜力用于实际应用的蓝细菌菌株，将需要完善用于表达异源途径的遗传电路，并开发准确的模型来预测如何将这些途径最佳地整合到更大的细胞代谢网络中。在此，我们综述了将合成生物学工具转化为蓝细菌模式生物所取得的进展，并总结了为提高其生物生产潜力而采用的实验方法和策略。尽管在过去几年中合成生物学和代谢工程取得了进展，但很明显，如果蓝细菌要在生产增值化合物方面与异养微生物竞争，仍需要进一步改进。
