Metabolic engineering to improve the biomanufacturing efficiency of acetic acid bacteria: advances and prospects

Abstract

With the high tolerance for acetic acid and abundant multifunctional enzymes, acetic acid bacteria (AAB), as valuable biocatalysts, exhibit great advantages during industrial acetic acid production and value‐added chemical fermentation. However, low biomass and a low production rates arising from acid stress remains major hurdles in industrial processes. Engineering AAB with excellent properties is expected to obtain economically viable production and facilitates their biotechnological applications. Here, the investigation of acetic acid-tolerance mechanisms and metabolic features is discussed, and effective targets are provided for the metabolic engineering of AAB. Next, we review the advances in improving AAB and compare these advances with improvement to other model acid-tolerant microorganisms. Furthermore, future directions involving the combination of systems biology and synthetic biology to achieve efficient biomanufacturing in AAB are highlighted.

Keywords:

• Acetic acid bacteria
• biocatalyst
• acetic acid-tolerance mechanism
• enzymes
• fine chemicals
• production
• metabolic engineering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to Prof. Zhou Jingwen for constructive advice on the manuscript. This work is financially supported by National Key Research and Development Plan [2017YFC1600401], National Natural Science Foundation of China [31901671], Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [JUSRP51734B], National First-class Discipline Program of Light Industry Technology and Engineering [2018-14], the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2018M642163] and Foundation [KF201820] of State Key Laboratory of Biobased Material and Green Papermaking, Qilu University of Technology, Shandong Academy of Sciences.