Development and application of ribosomal engineering in actinomycetes / 生物工程学报

Ribosomal engineering is a technique that can improve the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites in the antibiotics-resistant mutants by attacking the bacterial RNA polymerase or ribosome units using the corresponding antibiotics. Ribosomal engineering can be used to discover and increase the production of valuable bioactive secondary metabolites from almost all actinomycetes strains regardless of their genetic accessibility. As a consequence, ribosomal engineering has been widely applied to genome mining and production optimization of secondary metabolites in actinomycetes. To date, more than a dozen of new molecules were discovered and production of approximately 30 secondary metabolites were enhanced using actinomycetes mutant strains generated by ribosomal engineering. This review summarized the mechanism, development, and protocol of ribosomal engineering, highlighting the application of ribosomal engineering in actinomycetes, with the aim to facilitate future development of ribosomal engineering and discovery of actinomycetes secondary metabolites.

Research progress of Pictet-Spenglerases / 生物工程学报

Pictet-Spenglerases (P-Sases) catalyze the Pictet-Spengler (P-S) reactions and exhibit high stereoselectivity and regioselectivity under mild conditions. The typical P-S reaction refers to the condensation and recyclization of β-arylethylamine with aldehyde or ketone under acidic conditions to form tetrahydroisoquinoline and β-carboline alkaloid derivatives. The related enzymatic products of P-Sases are the backbones of various bioactive compounds, including clinical drugs: morphine, noscapine, quinine, berberine, ajmaline, morphine. Furthermore, the activity of P-Sases in stereoselective and regioselective catalysis is also valuable for chemoenzymatic synthesis. Therefore, this review summarizes the research progress in the discovery, functional identification, biological characteristics and catalytic applications of P-Sases, which provide the useful theoretical reference in future P-Sases research and development.