Special issue on genome editing tools and applications for natural products and industrial biotechnology

Introduction:

To meet the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations, we need to form a greener and biosustainable society, with natural products and bio-based production at an industrial scale playing important roles in multiple areas. These range from medicines to treat microbial infections and sustainable agrichemicals to food protectives or bio-dyes.

The ability to sequence whole genomes of microorganisms, combined with methods to efficiently clone large and complex biosynthetic pathways and efficiently edit genomes, has revolutionised the research field. Many of these technologies are not restricted to common and well-studied model organisms and production strains, but also enable the metabolic engineering of a great diversity of non-model bacterial or fungal hosts, including many secondary/specialised metabolite producers.

This special issue will feature review and research papers describing new and optimised genome manipulation tools and their applications for natural product research and industrial biotechnology.

Topics covered:

These will include, but not be limited to:

• Bacterial and fungal genome editing
• Genome miningapproaches and applications for microbial specialised metabolites
• Metabolic engineering of specialised metabolite production
• CRISPR-based gene manipulation tools
• Bio/cheminformatics tools and algorithms to study specialised metabolites
• Biosensor development and application
• Genome mining-based identification and characterisation of novel specialised metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters

Important deadlines: 

• Submission deadline (for full papers):  30 June 2023
• Publication date: upon acceptance

Submission instructions:

Please read the Guide for Authors before submitting. All articles should be submitted online; please select the special issue “Genome editing tools and applications for natural products and industrial biotechnology”.

Manuscripts will be reviewed and published on a first-come, first-served basis. Once all accepted manuscripts are published, they will be gathered together in this special issue.

Guest editors:

• Prof. Tilmann Weber, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark. Email: tiwe@biosustain.dtu.dk
• Prof. Yaojun Tong, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Email: yaojun.tong@sjtu.edu.cn