Construction of artificial membrane transport metabolons – an emerging strategy in metabolic engineering

The term 'membrane transport metabolon' refers to the physical association of membrane transporters with enzymes that metabolize the transported substrates. In naturally evolved systems, physiological relevance of coupling transport with sequential enzymatic reactions resides, for instance, in faster turnover rates, protection of substrates from competing pathways or shielding the cellular environment from toxic compounds. Such underlying principles offer attractive possibilities for metabolic engineering approaches and concepts for constructing artificial transporter-enzyme complexes are recently being developed. In this minireview, the modes of substrate channeling across biological membranes and design principles for artificial transport metabolons are discussed.