Abstract
Regulatable promoters are important genetic tools, particularly for assigning function to essential and redundant genes. They can also be used to control the expression of enzymes that influence metabolic flux or protein secretion, thereby optimizing product yield in bioindustry. This review will focus on regulatable systems for use in filamentous fungi, an important group of organisms whose members include key research models, devastating pathogens of plants and animals, and exploitable cell factories. Though we will begin by cataloging those promoters that are controlled by nutritional or chemical means, our primary focus will rest on those who can be controlled by a literal flip-of-the-switch: promoters of light-regulated genes. The vvd promoter of Neurospora will first serve as a paradigm for how light-driven systems can provide tight, robust, tunable, and temporal control of either autologous or heterologous fungal proteins. We will then discuss a theoretical approach to, and practical considerations for, the development of such promoters in other species. To this end, we have compiled genes from six previously published light-regulated transcriptomic studies to guide the search for suitable photoregulatable promoters in your fungus of interest.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Monika Schmoll (Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna) for her assistance with the Trichoderma reesei datasets as well as the Fungal Genetics Stock Center for its ongoing service to the fungal research community.
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This work was supported by grants R35GM118021 to JCD and R35GM118022 to JJL. All authors declare they have no conflict of interest. This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.
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Fuller, K.K., Dunlap, J.C. & Loros, J.J. Light-regulated promoters for tunable, temporal, and affordable control of fungal gene expression. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 102, 3849–3863 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-8887-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-8887-7