Central Carbon Metabolic Pathways in Streptomyces

Streptomyces and other actinomycetes are fascinating soil bacteria of major economic importance. They produce 70% of antibiotics known to man and numerous other pharmaceuticals for treatment of, e.g. cancer, a range of infections, high cholesterol, or have immunosuppressive activity. It is not surprising that the multitude of gene clusters encoding for the biosynthesis of known and unknown secondary metabolites in genome sequences of a wide range of actinomycetes have received much attention in the last few years. In contrast, there is much less understanding of primary metabolism and its control in actinomycetes, despite its importance as supply pathways of precursors for secondary metabolite production. This review describes current information on the central carbon metabolic pathways in streptomycetes, focussing on glycolysis, pentose phosphate pathway, Entner-Doudoroff pathway, gluconeogenesis, and the source of phosphate for phosphorylation reactions. In addition, recent developments providing a greater insight into links with secondary metabolism in Streptomyces are reviewed.