Metabolic Engineering for Advanced Biofuels Production and Recent Advances Toward Commercialization

Abstract

Research on renewable biofuels produced by microorganisms has enjoyed considerable advances in academic and industrial settings. As the renewable ethanol market approaches maturity, the demand is rising for the commercialization of more energy-dense fuel targets. Many strategies implemented in recent years have considerably increased the diversity and number of fuel targets that can be produced by microorganisms. Moreover, strain optimization for some of these fuel targets has ultimately led to their production at industrial scale. In this review, the recent metabolic engineering approaches for augmenting biofuel production derived from alcohols, isoprenoids, and fatty acids in several microorganisms are discussed. In addition, the successful commercialization ventures for each class of biofuel targets are discussed.

Optimization of the IPP-bypass mevalonate pathway and fed-batch fermentation for the production of isoprenol in Escherichia coli

“…Increasing concerns about the cost and environmental impact of petroleum-derived fuels (Baral et al, 2019) has motivated the development of microbial hosts for the production of fuels from renewable carbon sources (Cheon et al, 2016;Liao et al, 2016;Meadows et al, 2018;Rabinovitch-Deere et al, 2013). In particular, 3-methyl-3-buten-1-ol (isoprenol) is a promising alternative to gasoline due to its anti-knocking properties, comparable energy density, and comparable research octane number (Liu et al, 2014;Mack et al, 2014).…”

Identification of Promising Alternative Mono-Alcohol Fuel Blend Components for Spark Ignition Engines

“…We suggest that it is of interest to first consider the promise of a candidate alcohol for gasoline blending, and then to use retrosynthetic or other techniques to determine production pathways and to ascertain whether the identified alcohols have the potential to be produced at costs and volumes necessary for commercial relevance. Many higher alcohols can be produced via biological pathways from cellulosic sugars, and there are many efforts to use metabolic engineering to increase the yield and productivity of non-traditional biofuels [65][66][67][68]. There are also non-fermentative pathways to produce higher alcohols [69][70][71].…”

A review on green liquid fuels for the transportation sector: a prospect of microbial solutions to climate change

“…Advances in metabolic engineering techniques have pushed commercialization of the fermentative production of butanol. However, further research in the areas of non-food substrates application, process optimization, and product recovery are still needed to sustain current commercialization efforts (Greene, 2004;Meadows et al, 2018). Butanol produced from fossil fuels and gases is presently commercially available as a solvent and for the production of butyl acrylate which is a primary chemical feedstock used for the production of water-based paints.…”