Advances in high-throughput screening approaches for biosurfactants: current trends, bottlenecks and perspectives

Abstract

The market size of biosurfactants (BSs) has been expanding at an extremely fast pace due to their broad application scope. Therefore, the re-construction of cell factories with modified genomic and metabolic profiles for desired industrial performance has been an intriguing aspect. Typical mutagenesis approaches generate huge mutant libraries, whereas a battery of specific, robust, and cost-effective high-throughput screening (HTS) methods is requisite to screen target strains for desired phenotypes. So far, only a few specialized HTS assays have been developed for BSs that were successfully applied to obtain anticipated mutants. The most important milestones to reach, however, continue to be: specificity, sensitivity, throughput, and the potential for automation. Here, we discuss important colorimetric and fluorometric HTS approaches for possible intervention on automated HTS platforms. Moreover, we explain current bottlenecks in developing specialized HTS platforms for screening high-yielding producers and discuss possible perspectives for addressing such challenges.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Biosurfactants
• mutagenesis
• high-throughput screening
• miniaturization
• fluorescent-activated cell sorting
• colorimetric detection

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Tianjin Synthetic Biotechnology Innovation Capacity Improvement Project [TSBICIP-BRFI-004, TSBICIP-CXRC-002] and Hundreds of Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [Y0J51009]. Science and Technology Partnership Program, Ministry of Science and Technology of China [KY202001017].