Oksana Knysh, Artur Martynov
Conventionally, bacteriocins are produced by microorganisms on complex substrates, released as semi-purified preparations or crude fermentates. These bacteriocin-containing products often exhibit unsatisfactory purity, low active-substance content, and high production costs, limiting their commercialization and use. This review aims to analyze current approaches to improving the production of high-quality bacteriocin-containing products. Selection of the most productive strains, as well as targeted modification of producers through mutagenesis and genetic engineering, enhances bacteriocin yield. Optimizing production conditions by adjusting non-nutritional and nutritional environmental factors, as well as co-cultivation with bacteriocin-inducing microorganisms, also increases the bacteriocinogenic productivity of strains. Traditional approaches, relying on a "trial-and-error" paradigm, do not guarantee maximum bacteriocin yield or the purity of the final product, nor do they eliminate the complexity, labor- and resource-intensity of the production process. Modern solution-driven approaches, using systems biology, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence, are shifting toward the rational, theoretically predicted design of highly efficient "cell factories." Conventional cultivation of producers is a time-consuming process that takes from several days to several weeks and requires separate research for each species. Cell-free protein synthesis dramatically accelerates the production of high-purity bacteriocins in vitro, reducing the process to a few hours. Implementation of advanced approaches and technologies opens up prospects for the successful scaling up of high-quality bacteriocin production, reducing the complexity and resource intensity of the process, thereby accelerating their commercialization and application in medical practice and the food industry.