About this Research Topic
Recombinant DNA technology enables overproduction of the desired protein product, which is of considerable value for industrial applications. The recombinant proteins market is seeing consistent growth and, thanks to advances in research and technological developments, novel recombinant proteins with valuable properties are being discovered.
To sustain this progress, there is a pressing need to design economically sustainable production processes. Among the producer cells, bacteria appear to be the most favourable surrogates, as their relatively simple genome allows for straight-forward genetic manipulation, they are versatile and adaptive to low-nutrient cost-effective culture media, and bacterial propagation is easily scalable.
To be technically and economically feasible, the production scheme for recombinant proteins needs to fulfill the requirements for high-titer production, inexpensive raw materials, and low facility-dependence. The mass production of recombinant proteins in an efficient way remains challenging, especially for those of heterologous nature. Central metabolism provides precursor metabolites and energy to fuel the cellular activity. However, proteosynthesis is an extremely energy-intensive process, and accordingly, the forced production of a gene-encoding product usually perturbs cell physiology as a result of the energy drought and imbalanced carbon flux in central metabolism. In this situation, a metabolic burden emerges that leads to a bacterial stress response, which in turn restricts cellular growth and protein synthesis. Further research and advanced genetic strategies are needed to address this bottleneck in upscale protein production.
This Research Topic welcomes Original Research and Review articles on the following subthemes:
• Application of Omic technologies for identifying bottlenecks of recombinant protein production.
• Development of novel and cost-effective strategies for bacterial production of recombinant proteins.
• Use of genetic strategies involving genetic circuit design for reprogramming bacterial metabolism.
Keywords: Recombinant proteins, Genetic tools, High-throughput screening, Raw substrates, Secretion apparatus, Metabolism reprogramming, Omic technologies
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
