Actinomycetes continue to be important sources for the discovery of secondary metabolites for applications in human medicine, animal health, and crop protection. With the maturation of actinomycete genome mining as a robust approach to identify new and novel cryptic secondary metabolite gene clusters, it is critical to continue developing methods to activate and enhance secondary metabolite biosynthesis for discovery, development, and large-scale manufacturing. This review covers recent reports on promising new approaches and further validations or technical improvements of existing approaches to strain improvement applicable to a wide range of Streptomyces species and other actinomycetes.
Keywords: Actinomycete; Chemical mutagenesis; Genome mining; Heterologous expression; RNA polymerase; Regulatory genes; Ribosome engineering; Secondary metabolites; Streptomyces; Synthetic biology; Transposon mutagenesis.