Advances in Enhanced Menaquinone-7 Production From Bacillus subtilis

Chaoyong Liao; Hammed Ayansola; Yanbo Ma; Koichi Ito; Yuming Guo; Bingkun Zhang

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2021.695526

Advances in Enhanced Menaquinone-7 Production From Bacillus subtilis

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2021 Jul 19:9:695526. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2021.695526. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Chaoyong Liao¹, Hammed Ayansola¹, Yanbo Ma², Koichi Ito³, Yuming Guo¹, Bingkun Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Animal Nutrition, Department of Animal Nutrition and Feed Science, College of Animal Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.
² Henan International Joint Laboratory of Animal Welfare and Health Breeding, Department of Animal Physiology, College of Animal Science and Technology, Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China.
³ Department of Food and Physiological Models, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Ibaraki, Japan.

Abstract

The production of nutraceutical compounds through biosynthetic approaches has received considerable attention in recent years. For example, Menaquinone-7 (MK-7), a sub-type of Vitamin K2, biosynthesized from Bacillus subtilis (B. subtilis), proved to be more efficiently produced than the conventional chemical synthesis techniques. This is possible due to the development of B. subtilis as a chassis cell during the biosynthesis stages. Hence, it is imperative to provide insights on the B. subtilis membrane permeability modifications, biofilm reactors, and fermentation optimization as advanced techniques relevant to MK-7 production. Although the traditional gene-editing method of homologous recombination improves the biosynthetic pathway, CRISPR-Cas9 could potentially resolve the drawbacks of traditional genome editing techniques. For these reasons, future studies should explore the applications of CRISPRi (CRISPR interference) and CRISPRa (CRISPR activation) system gene-editing tools in the MK-7 anabolism pathway.

Keywords: Bacillus subtilis; CRISPR activation; CRISPR interference; chassis cells; menaquinone-7; synthetic biology.

Publication types

Review