赤藓糖醇微生物合成研究进展

Advances in microbial production of erythritol

糖的过量摄入给人们的身体健康带来了风险。甜味剂的发现和合理使用有助于减少食品中糖的添加。作为天然甜味剂的赤藓糖醇,因其具有独特的理化性质如热值低、基本不被人体代谢、稳定性高和食用不会引起肠道不适等而受到广泛关注。目前,赤藓糖醇已被广泛用于食品、医药和化工产品中,其国内外市场需求量正逐年提升,这对赤藓糖醇的工业化生产提出了新的挑战。为此,笔者综述了利用微生物发酵合成赤藓糖醇的国内外最新研究概况,包括生产所使用的主要菌种和优良菌种选育策略、以可再生资源为原料合成赤藓糖醇的技术探索,以及菌种的代谢工程改造方案,讨论了提高赤藓糖醇产量的组合策略和路径,以期为今后高产赤藓糖醇菌种的选育和赤藓糖醇的绿色可持续生产提供思路和参考。

The excessive intake of sucrose in daily life has posed a serious risk to our health.To reduce the consumption of sugars by decreasing the direct addition of sucrose to foods, an alternative substance with low or non-caloric while possessing sweet taste, called sweetener, is needed.As a natural sweetener, erythritol has attracted much attention in past years due to its distinct characteristics, including low-caloric, providing no energy to the body, high stability, and without causing intestine disorders.At present, erythritol has been widely used in foods, medicines, chemical and industrial products, and its market around the world is still growing, which challenges the scale of industrial erythritol production.For this reason, we discuss here the recent advances in the production of erythritol by microorganisms, including the main species used in erythritol production as well as the strain breeding strategies, the biosynthesis of erythritol using renewable resources as the substrate, and metabolic engineering of the strains for enhanced production of erythritol, which aims to provide novel clues for the breeding of species with increased yield of erythritol and the sustainable production of erythritol in the future.