The fermentation of industrial bacteria encounters a serious problem in continuous culture, i.e. the production traits lose. However, current research on the mechanism of strain degeneration is not clear enough, and there are few methods to effectively control the degeneration. Under growth restriction, the mutation rate of fermentation strains increases. Many cellular processes and poor fermentation conditions can trigger the transposition of transposable elements, SOS response, and RpoS-controlled adaptive mutations, causing genetic instability. Genetic instability which resulted from point mutations and genomic rearrangements can be responsible for strain degeneration. This mini-review summarizes the degeneration phenomena and mechanisms in common industrial bacteria and highlights three mechanisms of strain degeneration, including the transposition of transposable elements, SOS response, and adaptive mutations. According to different mutation mechanisms, many promising strategies have been proposed to increase the stability and the yield of industrial strains, for example, developing platform strains free of insertion sequence to enhance the stability of recombinant plasmid, using SOS inhibitors to block the SOS response, and improving environmental tolerance capacity and fermentation conditions to reduce adaptive mutations.
Keywords: Adaptive mutation; Genetic instability; Mutagenesis; SOS response; Strain degeneration; Transposable element.