The Innovation Team for Design of Molecular Targets for Green Agrochemicals of IPPCAAS focuses on researches related to natural product biopesticides and the important industrial producer Streptomyces. The team has been dedicated to resolve the bottle-neck problems during construction of high-yield strains, and has made a series of achievements in different aspects, such as elucidation of regulatory and metabolic mechanism, mining of high-efficient genetic elements, and coordination of crucial metabolic pathway. Recently, they were invited to contribute a review article titled “Coordinating precursor supply for pharmaceutical polyketide production in Streptomyces” in the prestigious journal Current Opinion in Biotechnology.

Polyketide natural products, as secondary metabolites, are not involved in essential cellular processes and are usually produced during the stationary phase of fermentation. Consequently, the yield and productivity of these products are usually low, and often limited by the availability of the precursors. The precursor pathways, therefore, are key targets for synthetic biology-driven design and optimization. In this review, recent advances in precursor engineering, in both Streptomyces and other bacteria, focusing on the diverse native and heterologous precursor pathways that could be redesigned for polyketide titer improvement were discussed. Coordination of other necessary factors to direct the precursors towards polyketide biosynthesis was highlighted. The precursor-supply enhancement tools and strategies covered in this review will facilitate the design and construction of synthetic Streptomyces “cell-factories” for efficient polyketide production.

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program of CAAS.

More details can be found at the link below:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0958166920301671?dgcid=author

By Li Shanshan (ssli@ippcaas.cn)