Accelerated Metabolic Engineering for Industrial Strain Development via the Construction of a Large-Scale Genome Library

Production of chemicals via metabolic engineering of microbes is becoming highly important for sustainable bioeconomy. Conventional metabolic engineering methodologies typically involve labor-intensive and time-consuming processes of iterative genetic modifications, which are inefficient in identifying new genetic targets for the construction of robust industrial strains on a large scale. To accelerate the creation of efficient microbial cell factories and enhance our insights into cellular metabolism, diverse large-scale genome libraries are emerging as powerful tools, which can be established through multiplex or parallel genome editing, gene expression regulation, and incorporation of evolutionary strategies. In this review, we discuss the latest advancements in the construction of genome-scale libraries as well as their applications within the domain of metabolic engineering. We also address the limitations of various techniques and provide insights into future prospects for the field.