Progress in heterologous expression of fungal natural products-A review

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.

Key words:natural product;gene cluster;heterologous expression;synthetic biology