Abstract
Food is essential for human survival. Nowadays, traditional agriculture faces challenges in balancing the need of sustainable environmental development and the rising food demand caused by an increasing population. In addition, in the emerging of consumers’ awareness of health related issues bring a growing trend towards novel nature-based food additives. Synthetic biology, using engineered microbial cell factories for production of various molecules, shows great advantages for generating food alternatives and additives, which not only relieve the pressure laid on tradition agriculture, but also create a new stage in healthy and sustainable food supplement. The biosynthesis of food components (protein, fats, carbohydrates or vitamins) in engineered microbial cells often involves cellular central metabolic pathways, where common precursors are processed into different proteins and products. Quantitation of the precursors provides information of the metabolic flux and intracellular metabolic state, giving guidance for precise pathway engineering. In this review, we summarized the quantitation methods for most cellular biosynthetic precursors, including energy molecules and co-factors involved in redox-reactions. It will also be useful for studies worked on pathway engineering of other microbial-derived metabolites. Finally, advantages and limitations of each method are discussed.
Highlights
Food is a basic element for human beings as the main energy resource for body growth and maintenance in daily life
Methods commonly used for precursors quantitation were discussed in detail
Enzymatic reaction provides fast and high-throughput detection, can be applied for detection of various metabolites, while the specificity is lower than other methods
Summary
Food is a basic element for human beings as the main energy resource for body growth and maintenance in daily life. There is growing need for healthier and novel nature-based food products, such as foods without synthetic petroleum-based food dyes, or with sugar substitutes (Fabrica 2021), which cannot be satisfied by traditional agriculture. Since the basic food components are proteins, carbohydrates, fatty acids and vitamins (Colen et al, 2018), microbial cells can be engineered to produce each food components. These years, many progresses have been made in this area. Fatty acids, as a main component for meat flavor and taste used in meat analogues, was overproduced in engineered microbial cells by methods of synthetic biology
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