[Progress in developing and applying Streptomyces chassis - A review]

Natural products and their derivatives play an important role in modern healthcare. Their diversity in bioactivity and chemical structure inspires scientists to discover new drug entities for clinical use. However, chemical synthesis of natural compounds has insurmountable difficulties in technology and cost. Also, many original-producing bacteria have disadvantages of needing harsh cultivation conditions, having low productivity and other shortcomings. In addition, some gene clusters responsible for secondary metabolite biosynthesis are silence in the original strains. Therefore, it is of great significance to exploit strategy for the heterologous expression of natural products guided by synthetic biology. Recently, researchers pay more attention on using actinomycetes that are the main source of many secondary metabolites, such as antibiotics, anticancer agents, and immunosuppressive drugs. Especially, with huge development of genome sequencing, abundant resources of natural product biosynthesis in Streptomyces have been discovered, which highlight the special advantages on developing Streptomyces as the heterologous expression chassis cells. This review begins with the significance of the development of Streptomyces chassis, focusing on the strategies and the status in developing Streptomyces chassis cells, followed by examples to illustrate the practical applications of a variety of Streptomyces chassis.