1 Introduction
Yeast
is a valuable microbial cell factory in biosynthesis of industrial
products, such as biofuels, organic acids terpenoids, abscisic acid and
flavonoids[1-5]. However, cell
growth rate and product yield are limited in industrial fermentation
processes, due to the issues such as heat shock, product toxicities and
oxidative stress[6]. Some key reasons are these stresses can cause
reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation, protein denaturation,
chromosome damage, cell membrane destruction and dysmetabolism[1, 7,
8].
Despite
the intensive use of physical and chemical ways to reduce the
undermines, there are still significant challenges from fermentation
process, including the relatively high production cost of extra
operations and environment pollution.
TFs
are important components of complex signaling networks and they can
interact with kinases, other transcription factors and metabolite
molecules to transmit signals to the nucleus under stress stimulation.
So, TFs have the potential to control gene transcription in a specific
temporal and spatial scales to improve the complex phenotype [9,
10].
Recent
studies indicate that transcription factor (TFs) have focused on
regulating transcriptional level of tolerance genes that contribute to
contribute to stress tolerance traits. Therefore, improving the strains
tolerance by stress-responded TFs engineering will markedly deal with
stress on metabolic networks
[11].
Simultaneously, an enhanced understanding of TFs engineering in
combination with synthetic biology
theory will improve the applications of
native TFs and enable the further
development of synthetic biology
tools.
Native stress responsive TFs operated by genetic engineering, helps
promote the metabolism of the chassis toward the direction of improving
strains tolerance and industrial production. With the new strategies of
using TFs springing up, artificial transcription factors (ATFs) which
fuse a series of native TFs functional domains have extensive functions.
They can make up for the shortcomings of natural TFs and broaden the
application fields of TFs
engineering. In this review, we
briefly review the TF-related
molecular traits of cellular stress
responses and TFs engineering based on TFs regular pattern in improving
the stress tolerance and efficiency in biomanufacturing. We also
summarize the most recent applications of
Artificial transcription factors
(ATFs)
originated from native TFs, which can either be better used as parts to
fine tuning gene expression or for switch to control genes in metabolic
pathways than before. Even, it has been invented as devices to
quantitatively
evaluate metabolites content. Lastly, we discuss the understanding in
achieving strains biomanufacturing and innovations of synthetic biology
tools by TFs.