Host organism: Pseudomonas putida

The Gram-negative soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida features a number of unique traits: a versatile metabolism, an undemanding and flexible lifestyle, a high resistance against various environmental stresses, and the ability to mineralize various xenobiotics. Its toughness and ability to adapt to extreme environmental and nutritional niches results from an arsenal of over 80 annotated oxidoreductases and a high redox potential. All these properties and a generally regarded as safe (GRAS) safety status render P. putida a perfect biocatalyst for numerous biotechnological applications. Of particular interest is its natural ability to accumulate large amounts of polyhydroxyalkanoates, which have a growing potential as biodegradable plastics. Owing to an increasing knowledge and the development of new genetic tools, P. putida recently developed into a promising host for the heterologous expression of genes or metagenomic DNA from unculturable, genetically inaccessible or pathogen organisms. This opens a yet unexplored source of secondary metabolites for the development of new pharmaceutical drugs.