Corynebacterium glutamicum as a robust microbial factory for production of value-added proteins and small molecules: fundamentals and applications

Abstract Corynebacterium glutamicum (C. glutamicum) has been used for decades as the major producer of amino acids in industrial biotechnology. In the past years, substantial progress has been achieved of understanding fundamental knowledge about its gene expression and regulation, protein secretion, metabolism, and physiology, which enables engineering this Gram-positive bacterium to become a flexible and efficient platform for production of recombinant proteins and small molecules of important applications. In this chapter, we briefly summarize the protein secretion system, protein expression system, gene editing tools, small molecule production by rational design, and directed evolution of this bacterium. As it can be predicted in future, C. glutamicum holds the potential to be upgraded into one of the most successful industrial microorganisms in the world when the modern disciplines and technologies (synthetic biology, systems biology, CRISPR genomic editing, etc.) are applied in a combinatorial and advanced fashion.