Engineering of microorganisms for high production of amino acids

Abstract

Amino acids as the building blocks of proteins are widely applied in food, medicine, feed, and chemical industries. Amino acid production by microbial cell factories from renewable resources is praised for the environmental friendliness, mild reaction conditions, and high product purity, which helps to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality. Researchers have employed the methods of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology to engineer Escherichia coli and Corynebacterium glutamicum and optimized the culture conditions to construct the microbial cell factories with high performance for producing branched chain amino acids, amino acids of the aspartic acid and glutamic acid families, and aromatic amino acids. We review the engineering process of microbial cell factories for high production of amino acids, in the hope of providing a reference for the creation of high-performance microbial cell factories.