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Recent Progress in Microbial Biosynthesis by Coculture Engineering

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Abstract

With the development of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, a large number of industrially important products has been developed using engineered microorganisms, thereby promoting the sustainable development of society and the economy. However, this approach is challenged by the increasing demand for more complicated biosynthesis or bioconversion tasks. The emergence of coculture engineering, which divides the labor between cocultured strains, presents a new perspective for conducting heterologous biosynthesis and improving the bioproduction performance of target products. This new approach reduces the metabolic burden on each strain and improves the conversion of products beyond the limit of the metabolic capacity of a single microbial strain. Recent advances using coculture engineering for the production of natural products, chemicals and biofuels, and environmental applications are reviewed. Future directions and potential challenges for future research in this field are also discussed.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 31901024 and 32071422), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (2019M653160), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Sun Yat-sen University (20lgpy113) for their financial support.

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  1. Institute of Synthetic Biology, Biomedical Center, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, 510275, Guangzhou, China

    Y.-L. Liao, F.-X. Niu & J.-Z. Liu

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  1. Y.-L. Liao
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Correspondence to J.-Z. Liu.

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All authors declare they have no conflict of interest. This article does not contain any studies involving animals or human participants performed by any of the authors.

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Liao, YL., Niu, FX. & Liu, JZ. Recent Progress in Microbial Biosynthesis by Coculture Engineering. Appl Biochem Microbiol 57 (Suppl 1), S1–S10 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0003683821100033

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