Engineering microbial membranes to increase stress tolerance of industrial strains

The microbial membrane serves as a biological barrier that separates the interior of cells from the external environment, thus playing an important role in tolerance to stress conditions during industrial bioprocessing. Accordingly, engineering or regulation of membrane functions provides a great opportunity to improve the robustness of industrial strains and may enable increased titers, yield, and production of the targeted metabolites. In this review, we summarize the recent progress in metabolic engineering strategies to enhance membrane integrity, regulate membrane fluidity, and tune membrane permeability.