Trends in Microbiology
Volume 23, Issue 8, August 2015, Pages 498-508
Journal home page for Trends in Microbiology

Review
Tolerance engineering in bacteria for the production of advanced biofuels and chemicals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2015.04.008Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Microbial strains can be engineered to produce advanced biofuels and bulk chemicals that are inherently solvent-like in nature.

  • Solvents represent toxic end products for many host microbes.

  • Tolerance engineering focuses on developing microbes with improved robustness toward toxic or inhibitory end products.

  • Strains with improved tolerance can lead to improvement in productivity.

  • Cellular transporters that can export the toxic product provide an elegant mechanism to achieve greater tolerance and may also increase production.

During microbial production of solvent-like compounds, such as advanced biofuels and bulk chemicals, accumulation of the final product can negatively impact the cultivation of the host microbe and limit the production levels. Consequently, improving solvent tolerance is becoming an essential aspect of engineering microbial production strains. Mechanisms ranging from chaperones to transcriptional factors have been used to obtain solvent-tolerant strains. However, alleviating growth inhibition does not invariably result in increased production. Transporters specifically have emerged as a powerful category of proteins that bestow tolerance and often improve production but are difficult targets for cellular expression. Here we review strain engineering, primarily as it pertains to bacterial solvent tolerance, and the benefits and challenges associated with the expression of membrane-localized transporters in improving solvent tolerance and production.

Keywords

solvent tolerance
bacterial host engineering
biofuel production
efflux pump
transporters

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