Understanding and engineering alcohol-tolerant bacteria using OMICS technology

Abstract

Microbes are capable of producing alcohols, making them an important source of alternative energy that can replace fossil fuels. However, these alcohols can be toxic to the microbes themselves, retaring or inhibiting cell growth and decreasing the production yield. One solution is improving the alcohol tolerance of such alcohol-producing organisms. Advances in omics technologies, including transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and genomic technologies, have helped us understand the complex mechanisms underlying alcohol toxicity, and such advances could assist in devising strategies for engineering alcohol-tolerant strains. This review highlights these advances and discusses strategies for improving alcohol tolerance using omics analyses.

Keywords: Adaptive laboratory evolution; Alcohol tolerance; Bacteria; Omics technology.

Fig. 1

Strategy for the understanding alcohol-tolerance using omics technologies and recent engineering approaches for strain improvement. Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) is an approach for generating cells with improved growth and stress tolerance by mutations and natural selection. Global transcription machinery engineering (gTME) is an approach for obtaining various cellular phenotypes by reprogramming gene transcription using error-prone PCR. To combine omics analyses with these approaches, it is possible to expand our research for phenotypes of alcohol tolerance