Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering for amino acid production in <italic>Corynebacterium glutamicum</italic>

Amino acids are important compounds and have a wide range of applications in the food, medicine, and chemical industries. A majority of the amino acids can be produced by proteolytic extraction, chemical synthesis, and/or certain microbial processes. Among these processes, microbial fermentation has been employed to produce some of the most commonly used amino acids on an industrial scale. Corynebacterium glutamicum has been proceeding as a forerunner in the field of industrial microbiology over the past several decades because it is used to produce millions of tons of various amino acids each year. With the use of synthetic biology and emergence of the next-generation of genome editing tools, this particularly useful strain of bacteria can produce practically all sorts of amino acids as well as their derivatives. This work reviews the state-of-art use of metabolically engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum and presents typical examples of amino acid production using Corynebacterium glutamicum based on synthetic biology strategies, which represent potentially promising methods of removing a number of complex bottlenecks from industrial production of amino acids.