芳香族化合物广泛应用于化工、食品及医药等领域,多来自于化工合成或天然产物提取。天然微生物也具有合成芳香族化合物的能力,以维持自身生命活动代谢需求,但其积累能力较低。近几年利用代谢工程的方法对微生物特别是大肠杆菌进行途径优化、设计、改造等方法在提高其芳香族化合物的发酵产量方面取得了显著成效,并且创新地生产出多种有价值的芳香族衍生物。这些研究成果对于未来以合成生物学和细胞工厂为基础利用可再生资源进行工业生物制造,解决化石能源危机和天然产物提取等问题具有重要意义。

Aromatic compounds are widely used in chemical,food and pharmaceutical fields,and most of them are obtained from the chemical synthesis or extraction of natural products. Natural microbes also has the ability to synthesize aromatic compounds in order to maintain their metabolic demands of life activities,but their capabilities of accumulation are very low. In recent years,metabolic engineering is applied to optimize,design and modify microorganisms,especially Escherichia coli,to increase the fermentation yield of aromatic compounds,which has achieved remarkable success and produce a variety of valuable aromatic derivatives. These advances are very important for utilizing renewable resources to solve the fossil energy crisis and difficulties in natural product extraction and other issues if the technologies of synthetic biology and cell factory become more prevalent in the future.