Engineering of transcriptional regulators enhances microbial stress tolerance

Both prokaryotes and eukaryotes have pyramid-shaped hierarchical regulatory networks that control gene transcription, enabling the cell to respond to natural environmental changes. In recent years, manipulation and engineering of transcriptional regulatory proteins and networks have been used to elicit microbial tolerance to industrially relevant stresses. We review the current research on the engineering of regulators that include specific, "middle level", and global regulators, and native, artificial, and exogenous regulators. With an increasing number of transcriptional regulators identified and characterized, this methodology should prove promising for the improvement of microbial stress tolerance.