Background: The methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris is widely used as a bioengineering platform for producing industrial and biopharmaceutical proteins, studying protein expression and secretion mechanisms, and analyzing metabolite synthesis and peroxisome biogenesis. With the development of DNA microarray and mRNA sequence technology, the P. pastoris transcriptome has become a research hotspot due to its powerful capability to identify the transcript structures and gain insights into the transcriptional regulation model of cells under protein production conditions. The study of the P. pastoris transcriptome helps to annotate the P. pastoris transcript structures and provide useful information for further improvement of the production of recombinant proteins. Results: We used a massively parallel mRNA sequencing platform (RNA-Seq), based on next-generation sequencing technology, to map and quantify the dynamic transcriptome of P. pastoris at the genome scale under growth conditions with glycerol and methanol as substrates. The results describe the transcription landscape at the whole-genome level and provide annotated transcript structures, including untranslated regions (UTRs), alternative splicing (AS) events, novel transcripts, new exons, alternative upstream initiation codons (uATGs), and upstream open reading frames (uORFs). Internal ribosome entry sites (IRESes) were first identified within the UTRs of genes from P. pastoris, encoding kinases and the proteins involved in the control of growth. We also provide a transcriptional regulation model for P. pastoris grown on different carbon sources. Conclusions: We suggest that the IRES-dependent translation initiation mechanism also exists in P. pastoris. Retained introns (RIs) are determined as the main AS event and are produced predominantly by an intron definition (ID) mechanism. Our results describe the metabolic characteristics of P. pastoris with heterologous protein production under methanol induction and provide rich information for further in-depth studies of P. pastoris protein expression and secretion mechanisms.

Gene manipulation is essential for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, but the current general gene manipulation methods are not applicable to the non-model strain Corynebacterium glutamicum (C. glutamicum) ATCC14067, which is used for amino acid production. Here, we report an effective and sequential deletion method for C. glutamicum ATCC14067 using the exonuclease-recombinase pair RecE + RecT (RecET) for recombineering via a designed self-excisable linear double-strand DNA (dsDNA) cassette, which contains the Cre/loxP system, to accomplish markerless deletion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effective and simple strategy for recombination with markerless deletion in C. glutamicum ATCC14067. This strategy provides a simple markerless deletion strategy for C. glutamicum and builds a solid basis for producer construction.

Corynebacterium glutamicum is an essential industrial strain that has been widely harnessed for the production of all kinds of value-added products. Efficient multiplex gene editing and large DNA fragment deletion are essential strategies for industrial biotechnological research. Cpf1 is a robust and simple genome editing tool for simultaneous editing of multiplex genes. However, no studies on effective multiplex gene editing and large DNA fragment deletion by the CRISPR/Cpf1 system in C. glutamicum have been reported. Here, we developed a multiplex gene editing method by optimizing the CRISPR/Cpf1-RecT system and a large chromosomal fragment deletion strategy using the CRISPR/Cpf1-RecET system in C. glutamicum ATCC 14067. The CRISPR/Cpf1-RecT system exhibited a precise editing efficiency of more than 91.6% with the PAM sequences TTTC, TTTG, GTTG or CTTC. The sites that could be edited were limited due to the PAM region and the 1–7 nt at the 5′ end of the protospacer region. Mutations in the PAM region increased the editing efficiency of the − 6 nt region from 0 to 96.7%. Using a crRNA array, two and three genes could be simultaneously edited in one step via the CRISPR/Cpf1-RecT system, and the efficiency of simultaneously editing two genes was 91.6%, but the efficiency of simultaneously editing three genes was below 10%. The editing efficiency for a deletion of 1 kb was 79.6%, and the editing efficiencies for 5- and 20 kb length DNA fragment deletions reached 91.3% and 36.4%, respectively, via the CRISPR/Cpf1-RecET system. This research provides an efficient and simple tool for C. glutamicum genome editing that can further accelerate metabolic engineering efforts and genome evolution.

The fermentation production of platform chemicals in biorefineries is a sustainable alternative to the current petroleum refining process. The natural advantages of Corynebacterium glutamicum in carbon metabolism have led to C. glutamicum being used as a microbial cell factory that can use various biomass to produce value-added platform chemicals and polymers. In this review, we discussed the use of C. glutamicum surface display engineering bacteria in the three generations of biorefinery resources, and analyzed the C. glutamicum engineering display system in degradation, transport, and metabolic network reconstruction models. These engineering modifications show that the C. glutamicum engineering display system has great potential to become a cell refining factory based on sustainable biomass, and further optimizes the inherent properties of C. glutamicum as a whole-cell biocatalyst. This review will also provide a reference for the direction of future engineering transformation.

Here we report the genome sequence ofCorynebacterium glutamicumS9114, an industrial producer widely used in production of glutamate in China. Preliminary comparison with the sequences of theCorynebacterium glutamicumstrains ATCC 13032 and R revealed some notable mutagenesis that might be related to the high yield of glutamate.