天然产物的生物合成和组合生物合成研究进展

Advance in Biosynthesis and Combinatorial Biosynthesis of Natural Products

天然产物一直在药物的发现和发展过程中发挥着重要作用。化学合成作为增加天然产物结构多样性的传统方法,工艺繁杂。组合生物合成正逐渐成为药物研发的重点,与化学合成相比,其目标产物可以由重组菌株发酵大量生产,因而降低了生产成本和环境污染。本文综述了以生物合成为基础的组合生物合成研究策略,并以几种天然产物的研究为例介绍了相关的研究进展。

Natural products have played critical roles in the drug discovery and development. While it remains problematic to economically synthesize natural products and generate their analogs via chemical routes mainly due to the complex structures, combinatorial biosynthesis is attracting more and more attentions in both academic and industrial fields, the target molecules can be produced by a recombinant organism that is amenable for large-scale fermentation, thereby lowering the production cost and reducing the environmental concerns associated with conventional chemical syntheses. This article briefly introduced the principle and strategy of combinatorial biosynthesis, highlighted by the biosynthesis and metabolic engineering of a few pharmaceutically important natural products.