Genetic Engineering to Produce Polyketide Analogues

CHRISTOPHER REEVES; EDUARDO RODRIGUEZ

METHODS IN ENZYMOLOGY.

ELSEVIER ACADEMIC PRESS INC

Lugar: Burlington, MA, Estados Unidos; Año: 2009 vol. 459 p. 295 - 318

0076-6879

Polyketide natural products are among the most important microbial metabolites in human medicine and are widely used to treat both acute and degenerative diseases. The need to develop new drugs has prompted the idea of using heterologous systems for the expression of polyketide biosynthetic pathways. The basic idea behind this approach is to use heterologous bacterial systems with better growth and genetic characteristics that could support better production of a certain compound than the original host or that could allow the generation of novel analogues through combinatorial biosynthesis. Moreover, these hosts could be used to express cryptic secondary metabolic pathways or serve as surrogate hosts in metagenomics experiments in order to find potential new bioactive compounds. In this chapter we discuss recent advances in the heterologous production of polyketides in bacteria and describe some methodological improvements of the systems.