Potential Natural Food Preservatives and Their Sustainable Production in Yeast: Terpenoids and Polyphenols

Abstract

Terpenoids and polyphenols are high-valued plant secondary metabolites. Their high antimicrobial activities demonstrate their huge potential as natural preservatives in the food industry. With the rapid development of metabolic engineering, it has become possible to realize large-scale production of non-native terpenoids and polyphenols by using the generally recognized as safe (GRAS) strain, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as a cell factory. This review will summarize the major terpenoid and polyphenol compounds with high antimicrobial properties, describe their native metabolic pathways as well as antimicrobial mechanisms, and highlight current progress on their heterologous biosynthesis in S. cerevisiae. Current challenges and perspectives for the sustainable production of terpenoid and polyphenol as natural food preservatives via S. cerevisiae will also be discussed.

New Insights on the Use of Polyphenols as Natural Preservatives and Their Emerging Safety Concerns

“…They vary widely within different plants and play key roles in pigment formation, resisting environmental stresses including defense mechanisms against pathogens or ultraviolet radiation, and acting as chemical messengers. They consist of one or more aromatic rings with hydroxyl groups attached as shown in Figure 2 (Fantini et al, 2015;Lyu et al, 2019).…”

“…Literature on the biosynthesis of polyphenols has been thoroughly discussed by other authors (Knaggs, 2001;Tsao, 2010;Lyu et al, 2019) and because of that only a summary will be given in this work. In plants and microbes, the shikimate and phenylpropanoid metabolic pathways represent the main routes for polyphenol biosynthesis (Figure 2).…”

“…Intermediates from the phenylpropanoid pathway such as 4coumaroyl CoA serves as good precursors for the biosynthesis of complex polyphenols such as flavonoids and stilbenes (Lyu et al, 2019). Hence, gaining a complete understanding of polyphenol biosynthesis pathways and developing efficient strategies for their production is extremely important for the de novo synthesis of diverse high value metabolites for industrial applications.…”

“…This interdisciplinary field employs new tools and strategies from systems biology, synthetic biology and evolutionary engineering with conventional metabolic engineering (Choi et al, 2019). Recent reviews have focused on sustainable biosynthesis of polyphenols in bioengineered yeast; advances in tools and strategies for systems metabolic engineering with significant potential for industrial applications (Choi et al, 2019;Lyu et al, 2019). Several microrganisms have been engineered to synthesize various polyphenols.…”

“…Nevertheless, industrial application of polyphenols produced using metabolic engineered microbes still faces quite a number of challenges. The limitation of low productivity or yield, high toxicity to cell growth or low host tolerance to target compounds and expensive feedstock supply poses significant difficulty for their commercial production (Lyu et al, 2019). The development of highly advanced omics techniques and systems metabolic engineering tools is expected to unveil and provide a complete understanding of polyphenol biosynthesis pathways needed to circumvent microbial biosynthesis productivity challenges.…”