Engineering stilbene metabolic pathways in microbial cells

Numerous in vitro and in vivo studies on biological activities of phytostilbenes have brought to the fore the remarkable properties of these compounds and their derivatives, making them a top storyline in natural product research fields. However, getting stilbenes in sufficient amounts for routine biological activity studies and make them available for pharmaceutical and/or nutraceutical industry applications, is hampered by the difficulty to source them through synthetic chemistry-based pathways or extraction from the native plants. Hence, microbial cell cultures have rapidly became potent workhorse factories for stilbene production. In this review, we present the combined efforts made during the past 15 years to engineer stilbene metabolic pathways in microbial cells, mainly the Saccharomyces cerevisiae baker yeast, the Escherichia coli and the Corynebacterium glutamicum bacteria. Rationalized approaches to the heterologous expression of the partial or the entire stilbene biosynthetic routes are presented to allow the identification and/or bypassing of the major bottlenecks in the endogenous microbial cell metabolism as well as potential regulations of the genes involved in these metabolic pathways. The contributions of bioinformatics to synthetic biology are developed to highlight their tremendous help in predicting which target genes are likely to be up-regulated or deleted for controlling the dynamics of precursor flows in the tailored microbial cells. Further insight is given to the metabolic engineering of microbial cells with “decorating” enzymes, such as methyl and glycosyltransferases or hydroxylases, which can act sequentially on the stilbene core structure. Altogether, the cellular optimization of stilbene biosynthetic pathways integrating more and more complex constructs up to twelve genetic modifications has led to stilbene titers ranging from hundreds of milligrams to the gram-scale yields from various carbon sources. Through this review, the microbial production of stilbenes is analyzed, stressing both the engineering dynamic regulation of biosynthetic pathways and the endogenous control of stilbene precursors.