Chassis organism from Corynebacterium glutamicum: the way towards biotechnological domestication of Corynebacteria.

For a long time, Corynebacteria have been the organisms of choice for industrial bioproduction of amino acids. Later on, Corynebacteria have also been used for making biofuels and a suite of addedvalue chemicals. In this issue of Biotechnology Journal, Unthan et al. [1] provide a splendid example of how systems and synthetic biology approaches are instrumental for significantly contributing to the value of Corynebacterium glutamicum as a platform strain for industrial applications. To this end, genomic segments that appeared to be non-essential for maintaining every desirable trait in C. glutamicum were delineated. A massive, recursive deletion of each (or most) of such apparently useless DNA was then carried out to verify the relevance of the excised sequences, and the resulting C. glutamicum variants were tested under various growth conditions [1]. This approach produced not only interesting new strains but also raised new questions on how to design reliable microbial chassis that fulfil the biotechnological promise of synthetic biology.