Zymomonas mobilis: an alternative ethanol producer

Abstract

Zymomonas mobilis is a unique bacterium in the microbial world, and offers a number of advantages over the existing ethanol-producing microorganisms. Being a prokaryote, it is more amenable to genetic manipulations. Thus, it has attracted great attention in the ethanol production world and efforts have been made to commercialize its application for the purpose. Despite the various efforts made worldwide, none of the processes using this microbe has been commercialized owing to certain bottlenecks. To circumvent the hindrances currently associated with a Zymomonas process, researchers have made various attempts to improve the technology using different techniques. This paper reviews the different substrates and the genetic improvement techniques with special emphasis on mutagenesis and recombinant DNA technology used for ethanol production by Zymomonas strains.

Progress and perspective on lignocellulosic hydrolysate inhibitor tolerance improvement in Zymomonas mobilis

“…As a model bioethanol producer, Zymomonas mobilis has attracted considerable attention over the past decades due to its excellent industrial characteristics, such as the unique Entner-Doudoroff (ED) pathway under anaerobic conditions resulting in low cell mass formation, high specific rate of sugar uptake, high ethanol yield, notable ethanol tolerance, and the generally regarded as safe (GRAS) status (Panesar et al 2006;Rogers et al 2007). Furthermore, the availability of multiple genome sequences for 12 Zymomonas strains with small genome size around 2 Mb (Seo et al 2005;Yang et al 2009a;Zhao et al 2012), multiple genome-scale metabolic models (Kalnenieks et al 2014;Pentjuss et al 2013;Widiastuti et al 2011), and versatile genetic engineering strategies (Jia et al 2013;Shui et al 2015;Tan et al 2016) also accelerates the research progress in Z. mobilis.…”

Paradigm for industrial strain improvement identifies sodium acetate tolerance loci in Zymomonas mobilis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae

“…However, engineered bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Zymomonas mobilis, and others are also being developed and deployed in search of superior production economics (2 and 10). Z. mobilis are Gram-negative facultative anaerobic bacteria with desirable industrial biocatalyst characteristics, such as high-specific productivity, high ethanol yield, and ethanol tolerance (12% v∕v) (10)(11)(12). The genome sequence of Z. mobilis strain ZM4 has been determined (13) and its annotation improved by our group recently (14).…”

Effect of Temperature Stress and Metal Ion Supplement on Ethanol Fermentation by Zymomonas mobilis

“…Namun demikian mikroorganisme penghasil bioetanol lainnya, yaitu Zymomonas mobilis (Z. mobilis) juga menunjukkan potensi yang mirip dengan dua model bakteri sebelumnya. Z.mobilis mampu memanfaatkan substrat gula secara optimal untuk memproduksi etanol dengan hasil yang lebih tinggi, dengan tingkat (jumlah) pertumbuhan sel (biomassa) yang relatif rendah, sekaligus tanpa memerlukan kontrol oksigen selama masa fermentasi (Doelle et al, 1993;Seo et al, 2005, Lin andTanaka, 2006;Panesar et al, 2006;Sahm et al, 2006;Rogers et al, 2007). Bakteri ini juga sangat sesuai untuk pembuatan etanol berbahan lignoselulosa karena memiliki toleransi yang cukup tinggi terhadap berbagai macam inhibitor yang ada pada hidrolisat lignoselulosa (Shui et al, 2015).…”