[Research progress on synthetic scaffold in metabolic engineering - a review]

Metabolic engineering is a powerful tool to increase many valuable metabolites through enhancing pathways or introducing exogenous pathways from other organisms. As the complexity of the targeted structure increases, many problems arise when the host suffers from flux imbalance and some toxic effects. An emerging approach to solve these problems is the use of synthetic scaffolds to co-localize key enzymes and metabolites of the synthetic pathways, enhance the metabolic flux and limit the interaction between intermediate products in the host cell. Although many scaffolds made of proteins and nucleic acids have been explored and applied to a variety of research to the heterogeneous synthesis of multiple metabolites, success is rather limited. The precise assembly of synthetic scaffolds remains a difficult task. In this review, we summarized the application of synthetic scaffolds in metabolic engineering, and outlined the main principle of scaffold designs, then highlighted the current challenges in their application.