Abstract
Synthetic biology is an advanced form of genetic manipulation that applies the principles of modularity and engineering design to reprogram cells by changing their DNA. Over the last decade, synthetic biology has begun to be applied to bacteria that naturally produce biomaterials, in order to boost material production, change material properties and to add new functionalities to the resulting material. Recent work has used synthetic biology to engineer several Komagataeibacter strains; bacteria that naturally secrete large amounts of the versatile and promising material bacterial cellulose (BC). In this review, we summarize how genetic engineering, metabolic engineering and now synthetic biology have been used in Komagataeibacter strains to alter BC, improve its production and begin to add new functionalities into this easy-to-grow material. As well as describing the milestone advances, we also look forward to what will come next from engineering bacterial cellulose by synthetic biology.
Highlights
If you look up from this text and look around, it is very likely that you will see cellulose and cellulose-based products within reach
The last five years have seen a burst of new approaches to modify bacterial cellulose (BC)-producing bacteria via genetic interventions
Metabolic engineering guided by genome-scale metabolic models has been applied to achieve record titers of BC from K. xylinus strains and even modify the genomic DNA of these strains to reduce their chance of deleterious mutations
Summary
If you look up from this text and look around, it is very likely that you will see cellulose and cellulose-based products within reach. At least five Komagataeibacter species have become the focus of significant research and industry: K. xylinus, K. hansenii, K. rhaeticus, K. europaeus and K. medellinensis [5] Strains of these species are the most efficient producers of cellulose of all bacteria and the model organisms for bacterial cellulose research and applications [6]. A few pioneering groups have begun to apply synthetic biology methods to Komagataeibacter in the hope of engineering strains of bacteria that produce higher yields of BC, make BC with improved quality or produce BC with modified properties or new functionalities that make it of high value for new research and application areas. In this review we will summarize how past work in genetic engineering of BC-producing bacteria has led to the first successes in using synthetic biology in Komagataeibacter and in producing BC-based materials
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