Hosts engineering and in vitro enzymatic synthesis for the discovery of novel natural products and their derivatives

Abstract

Novel natural products (NPs) and their derivatives are important sources for drug discovery, which have been broadly applied in the fields of agriculture, livestock, and medicine, making the synthesis of NPs and their derivatives necessarily important. In recent years, biosynthesis technology has received increasing attention due to its high efficiency in the synthesis of high value-added novel products and its advantages of green, environmental protection, and controllability. In this review, the technological advances of biosynthesis strategies in the discovery of novel NPs and their derivatives are outlined, with an emphasis on two areas of host engineering and in vitro enzymatic synthesis. In terms of hosts engineering, multiple microorganisms, including Streptomyces, Aspergillus, and Penicillium, have been used as the biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) provider and host strain for the expression of BGCs to discover new compounds over the past years. In addition, the use of in vitro enzymatic synthesis strategy to generate novel compounds such as triterpenoid saponins and flavonoids is also hereby described.

Keywords:

• Hosts engineering
• in vitro enzymatic synthesis
• novel compounds
• high-throughput
• microorganism sources

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

No data was used for the research described in the art. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program (2020YFA0907903) and Key project at central government level: The ability establishment of sustainable use for valuable Chinese medicine resources (2060302).