真菌天然产物异源生产研究进展

Progress in heterologous expression of fungal natural products-A review

摘要:

真菌天然产物是天然药物的重要来源之一,大规模真菌基因组序列测序的完成表明真菌具有产生丰富的次级代谢产物的潜能。然而,许多真菌或生长缓慢,或不适宜在实验室条件下培养,或难以进行遗传操作,或化合物产量极低等,这些因素导致大量有价值的真菌天然产物无法获得。利用异源表达系统对真菌天然产物进行生产是发现新天然产物及解析其生物合成途径的有效手段,并为定向的以合成生物学的手段去合成重要活性分子奠定基础。本文对目前用于真菌天然产物生产的各种异源表达系统进行了综述,并结合最新的DNA组装技术展望了异源表达系统在真菌天然产物研究中的应用价值和前景。

Abstract:

Fungal products are important resources for natural drugs. Availabilities of many fungal genome sequences indicate that fungi have the huge potential to produce secondary metabolites. However, many valuable fungal natural products are hard to obtain under regular lab conditions because fungi are slow to grow, difficult to genetically modify, or have low yield of desired metabolites. Therefore, developing a heterologous expression system has been an efficient approach to discover novel natural product and elucidate the complicated biosynthetic pathways. This review describes several heterologous expression systems that have been successfully used for the expression of fungal biosynthetic gene clusters. Also, we address the application perspective based on the emerging DNA assembly technologies.