Progress in genome shuffling in the post genomic era for microbial strains improvement

Abstract:

As a practical and efficient strain breeding technology, genome shuffling has circumvented the essential requirements of comprehensively cognized genetic background and operable genetic system for the microbial manipulations, and could break through the species limit to accelerate the directed evolution of important microorganisms via the recursive protoplasts fusion. Hence it has been widely applied for the strain improvement and the industrial development of various metabolites in the microorganisms. In the post genomic era, the rapid development of omics and bioinformatics make genome shuffling as an important bridge to link different strain breeding methods, and enable us to explore the complex metabolic networks and global regulatory mechanisms in microbes, which provides an opportunity to design the accurate manipulation for the directed evolution of target microorganism. This paper has systematically summarized the recent applications of genome shuffling in the microbial strain improvement, the research progresses involving related studies in genomics, transcriptomics and proteinomics are especially described in detail. Moreover, the great potential of combinative applications of genome shuffling with omics, bioinformatics, and synthetic biology, are also forecasted.