Abstract
Since the advent of systems and synthetic biology, many studies have sought to harness microbes as cell factories through genetic and metabolic engineering approaches. Yeast and filamentous fungi have been successfully harnessed to produce fine and high value-added chemical products. In this review, we present some of the most promising advances from recent years in the use of fungi for this purpose, focusing on the manipulation of fungal strains using systems and synthetic biology tools to improve metabolic flow and the flow of secondary metabolites by pathway redesign. We also review the roles of bioinformatics analysis and predictions in synthetic circuits, highlighting in silico systemic approaches to improve the efficiency of synthetic modules.
Highlights
The authors identified minimal regions in centromeres that were capable of promoting the stable segregation of vectors in Scheffersomyces stipitis, an unconventional yeast that the authors studied for the production of shikimate pathway-derived compounds owing to the native capacity of the yeast to metabolize xylose. This is a remarkable milestone in the field of synthetic biology, both for the identification of centromere functional minimal regions and for the successful application of Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) for an unconventional yeast species, paving the way for novel strategies to engineer novel strains for industrial purposes (Cao et al, 2017)
The findings showed that this methodology has the potential to redirect metabolic flux in yeast species, including S. cerevisiae and P. pastoris
Systems and synthetic biology are playing a pivotal role in the development of tools for engineering yeast and filamentous fungi
Summary
Since the advent of systems and synthetic biology, many studies have sought to harness microbes as cell factories through genetic and metabolic engineering approaches. We present some of the most promising advances from recent years in the use of fungi for this purpose, focusing on the manipulation of fungal strains using systems and synthetic biology tools to improve metabolic flow and the flow of secondary metabolites by pathway redesign.
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