Membrane transporter engineering in industrial biotechnology and whole cell biocatalysis.
Because they mainly do not involve chemical changes, membrane transporters have been a Cinderella subject in the biotechnology of small molecule production, but this is a serious oversight. Influx transporters contribute significantly to the flux towards product, and efflux transporters ensure the accumulation of product in the much greater extracellular space of fermentors. Programmes for improving biotechnological processes might therefore give greater consideration to transporters than may have been commonplace. Strategies for identifying important transporters include expression profiling, genome-wide knockout studies, stress-based selection, and the use of inhibitors. In addition, modern methods of directed evolution and synthetic biology, especially those effecting changes in energy coupling, offer huge opportunities for increasing the flux towards extracellular product formation by transporter engineering.
School of Chemistry, The University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK; Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and Centre for Synthetic Biology of Fine and Speciality Chemicals (SYNBIOCHEM), The University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK. Electronic address: dbk@manchester.ac.uk.
Douglas B
DB
Kell
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and Centre for Synthetic Biology of Fine and Speciality Chemicals (SYNBIOCHEM), The University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK; School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Neil
N
Swainston
Cambridge Systems Biology Centre and Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Sanger Building, 80 Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1GA, UK.
Pınar
P
Pir
Cambridge Systems Biology Centre and Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Sanger Building, 80 Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1GA, UK.
Stephen G
SG
Oliver
D001709:Biotechnology; D005285:Fermentation; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D026901:Membrane Transport Proteins; D060847:Metabolic Engineering; D015202:Protein Engineering; D058615:Synthetic Biology
D026901:Membrane Transport Proteins
GWAS; biotechnology; drug transporters; flux improvements; stress tolerance