Abstract:Antimicrobial peptides(AMPs)are a kind of cationic peptides which consist of short amino acid sequences and perform the defense system toward bacteria, virus. Different kinds of AMPs have been isolated from animals, plants, and microorganism. AMPs have important clinical application value due to their typically broad-spectrum activity against multiple pathogens. Heterogeneous expression has been demonstrated to be the most suitable tools to product antimicrobial peptides. Escherichia coli has a lot of advantages as a classic expression host, including its fast growth, clear genetic background, with a lot of available commercial expression vectors, easy operation and so on. E. coli become the preferred antimicrobial peptide expression host. Lactic acid bacteria have the advantage of being GRAS(generally recognized as safe), and have emerged in recent years as one of the most important heterogeneous expression strains of antimicrobial peptides. Developments of heterologous production of antimicrobial peptides in Escherichia coli and lactic acid bacteria were reviewed.