Abstract
The low production of natural products (NPs) is still the critical restrictive factor in exploiting their potential large-scale applications and a barrier to isolating and identifying other meaningful products. Given that the stimulation of cell wall integrity (CWI) has become a novel strategy to modulate the production of microbial natural products, herein, exogenous β-glucanase treatment was developed as an external cell wall β-glucan stress to stimulate the fungal CWI, and then to improve the production of fungal NPs. It was found that the production of fungal NPs cercosporin and sophorolipids, biosynthesized by Cercospora sp. and Starmerella bombicola, respectively, was significantly improved by the treatment of β-glucanase under a controllable dose. Moreover, it demonstrated that β-glucanase had an ability to stimulate fungal CWI through slight fungal superficial damage, thus facilitating the secretion of NPs. We expected that this easy-operating method to stimulate fungal CWI could be feasible to improve more fungal NPs production.
Key points
• Exogenous β-glucanase stimulated the fungal cell wall integrity
• Changing fungal cell walls modulated natural product production
• β-glucanase with potential universal effects on more fungal natural products
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All data and strains in this study are available from the corresponding author with a reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Xiaonan Zhu from Analytical & Test Platform at the School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, for the FESEM observation, Yuan Zhou from Shiyanjia Lab (www.shiyanjia.com) for the TEM and SEM observation, and Jiahuan An from Shiyanjia Lab (www.shiyanjia.com) for the HPAEC analysis.
Funding
This study is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFC2102700), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32270082), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20202002)
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TZ, SY, HX, and HL performed the experiments and analyzed the data. TZ and SY contributed equally to the article. TZ, SY, and YR wrote the manuscript. YR designed and supervised this project. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhou, T., Yu, S., Xu, H. et al. Stimulating fungal cell wall integrity by exogenous β-glucanase to improve the production of fungal natural products. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 106, 7491–7503 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-022-12224-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-022-12224-2