Natural products have demonstrated value across numerous application areas, with antibiotics a notable historical example. Native cellular hosts provide an initial option in efforts to harness natural product production. However, various complexities associated with native hosts, including fastidious growth traits and limited molecular biology tools, have prompted an alternative approach termed heterologous biosynthesis that relies upon a surrogate biological system to reconstitute the biosynthetic sequence stemming from transplanted genetic blueprint. In turn, heterologous biosynthesis offers the benefit of enzymatically driven complex natural product formation combined with the prospect of improved compound access via scalable cellular production. In this review, we conduct a literature meta-analysis of heterologous natural product biosynthesis over the period of 2011−2020 with the goal of identifying trends in heterologous natural product host selection, target natural products, and compound-host selection tendencies, with associated commentary on the research directions of heterologous biosynthesis based upon this analysis.

天然产物已在许多应用领域证明了其价值，抗生素就是一个著名的历史例子。原生蜂窝宿主为利用天然产物的生产提供了最初的选择。然而，与本地宿主相关的各种复杂性，包括精挑细选的生长性状和有限的分子生物学工具，促使人们提出了一种称为异源生物合成的替代方法，该方法依赖于替代生物系统来重构源自移植遗传蓝图的生物合成序列。反过来，异源生物合成提供了酶促合成复杂天然产物形成的好处，并具有通过可扩展的细胞生产改善化合物获取的前景。在这篇评论中