Microbial Cell Factories for Green Production of Vitamins.

Yanyan Wang,Dawei Zhang,Zhaoxia Jin,Linxia Liu

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2021.661562

Abstract

Vitamins are a group of essential nutrients that are necessary to maintain normal metabolic activities and optimal health. There are wide applications of different vitamins in food, cosmetics, feed, medicine, and other areas. The increase in the global demand for vitamins has inspired great interest in novel production strategies. Chemical synthesis methods often require high temperatures or pressurized reactors and use non-renewable chemicals or toxic solvents that cause product safety concerns, pollution, and hazardous waste. Microbial cell factories for the production of vitamins are green and sustainable from both environmental and economic standpoints. In this review, we summarized the vitamins which can potentially be produced using microbial cell factories or are already being produced in commercial fermentation processes. They include water-soluble vitamins (vitamin B complex and vitamin C) as well as fat-soluble vitamins (vitamin A/D/E and vitamin K). Furthermore, metabolic engineering is discussed to provide a reference for the construction of microbial cell factories. We also highlight the current state and problems encountered in the fermentative production of vitamins.

Highlights

Vitamins are essential for proper growth and health of animals, that cannot produce vitamins by themselves or that synthesize insufficient amount to cover all their needs (Capone and Sentongo, 2019; Suter, 2020)
Fat-soluble vitamins are dissolved in fats but not in water, and which are stored in the liver or fatty tissues for future use
E. coli has emerged as the preferred cell factory for Thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) production after a riboswitch-based biosensors enabled the discovery of thiamine transporters, combined with overexpression of the native thiFSGHCE and thiD genes, which are closely related to Fe-S metabolism (Figure 1A and Table 1; Cardinale et al, 2017)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Vitamins are essential for proper growth and health of animals, that cannot produce vitamins by themselves or that synthesize insufficient amount to cover all their needs (Capone and Sentongo, 2019; Suter, 2020). The methods of producing vitamins are based either on chemical synthesis or fermentative production (Yuan et al, 2020). Vitamin production strains have been improved through mutagenesis and metabolic engineering, which can be conducted either through chemical or biological means. As the fermentation technology matures, this approach is increasingly being used in industry to increase the production of different vitamins. We mainly discuss vitamins that can be produced by green fermentation processes. It covers water-soluble vitamins, including vitamin C and vitamin B complex (thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, biotin, folate, and cobalamin) as well as the fat-soluble vitamin E and vitamin K. We discussed the producing microorganisms, advanced biological methods and metabolic bottlenecks of different vitamins

B Vitamins

Findings

CONCLUSION