TY - JOUR
AU - Stephanopoulos, Gregory
AB - 


The ideal organism for biofuel production will possess high substrate use and processing capacities, fast and deregulated pathways of sugar transport, good tolerances to inhibitors and product, and high metabolic fluxes and will produce a single fermentation product. It is unclear whether such an organism will be engineered using a native isolated strain or a recombinant model organism as the starting point.


Ethanol and other alternative, next-generation biofuels all rely on the application of metabolic engineering principles to create an industrially relevant organism.


The discovery of additional diverse pathways through bioprospecting methods and new strain isolation will certainly improve prospects for further optimizing microorganisms and play an important part in developing biofuel production systems.


Advances in synthetic biology provide a valuable technology, enabling better diversification of the biofuel-type molecules that are produced in standard model organisms.


The divergent and often competing metabolic pathways that are required for the conversion of the relevant carbohydrates increase the challenge of finding or engineering one such superior organism. Therefore, it is important to consider the potential of using multiple engineered organisms to accomplish the goal of biofuels production.


The future of bioprocessing (whether biofuels or other chemicals) will be faced with the choice between exploiting innate cellular capacity and importing biosynthetic potential.



TI - Engineering for biofuels: exploiting innate microbial capacity or importing biosynthetic potential?
JF - Nature Reviews Microbiology
DO - 10.1038/nrmicro2186
DA - 2009-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/engineering-for-biofuels-exploiting-innate-microbial-capacity-or-b11hk3EV8j
SP - 715
EP - 723
VL - 7
IS - 10
DP - DeepDyve
ER -