Minimal genome: Worthwhile or worthless efforts toward being smaller?

Microbial cells are versatile hosts for the production of value-added products due to the well-established background knowledge, various genetic tools, and ease of manipulation. Despite those advantages, efficiency of newly incorporated synthetic pathways in microbial cells is frequently limited by innate metabolism, product toxicity, and growth-mediated genetic instability. To overcome those obstacles, a minimal genome harboring only the essential set of genes was proposed, which is a fascinating concept with potential for use as a platform strain. Here, we review the currently available artificial reduced genomes and discuss the prospects for extending use of the genome-reduced strains as programmable chasses. The genome-reduced strains generally showed comparable growth to and higher productivity than their ancestral strains. In Escherichia coli, about 300 genes are estimated as the minimal number of genes under laboratory conditions. However, recent advances revealed that there are non-essential components in essential genes, suggesting that the design principle of minimal genomes should be reconstructed. Current technology is not efficient enough to reduce large amount of interspaced genomic regions or to synthesize the genome. Furthermore, construction of minimal genome frequently has failed due to lack of genomic information. Technological breakthroughs and intense systematic studies on genomes remain tasks.