About this Research Topic

Background

Microbial production is a promising platform for providing medicinally important agents, including (but not limited to) natural products and large biopharmaceutical molecules. Natural products, particularly the secondary metabolites from a range of sources, are an exceptional reservoir for clinical and pharmaceutical uses. Recombinant proteins, under the rapid development of synthetic biology and molecular biology tools, facilitate substantial advances in biopharmaceutics. Microbial fermentation stands out in the industry in terms of its short turnaround time and high efficiency. Metabolic engineering on the pathway manipulation or optimization enables the heterologous expression of functional enzymes for bioactive molecule biosynthesis. Meanwhile, the bioprocessing development on the scale-up bioreactors increases the yield to a significant extent. Nevertheless, the limitations regarding the post-modification, expression system, and complexity of products are still challenging. This research topic aims to collect examples of medicinally important agents from microbial productions and provide insight into forthcoming trends in microbial engineering.

Microbial production is one of the most practical approaches to generating bioactive natural products and will keep magnifying its influences in other pharmaceutical areas. The diversity of medicinally important agents enlarges the potential for treating diseases, while the increased applications bring in more challenges. For instance, how can we enhance productivity through metabolic engineering? How can we solve the solubility issues of incorrect protein folding? How can we implement appropriate post-modification to large molecules? Those tasks are bottlenecks in the current stage. This research topic anticipates providing valuable information in two dimensions: expanding the width of the pools regarding the application of essential biopharmaceuticals and exploring the depth of solutions for better production performance. Multiple discipline interactions are favored to assist this research topic better.

We welcome original research and comprehensive reviews covering but not limited to the following topics:
• Clinically or pharmaceutically used agents produced by microorganisms
• Medicinally important drugs that was biosynthesized by microbial tools
• Metabolic engineering on microbial production for higher yield or better performance
• Scale-up fermentation in the industrial production
• Optimized expression systems for protein production
• Post-modification for recombinant proteins and other biologics

Keywords: natural products, recombinant proteins, metabolic engineering, fermentation, expression, modification, bioprocessing, synthetic biology, pharmaceutical

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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