Metabolic engineering strategies for microbial synthesis of oleochemicals
Other text in scientific journal, 2015

Microbial synthesis of oleochemicals has advanced significantly in the last decade. Microbes have been engineered to convert renewable substrates to a wide range of molecules that are ordinarily made from plant oils. This approach is attractive because it can reduce a motivation for converting tropical rainforest into farmland while simultaneously enabling access to molecules that are currently expensive to produce from oil crops. In the last decade, enzymes responsible for producing oleochemicals in nature have been identified, strategies to circumvent native regulation have been developed, and high yielding strains have been designed, built, and successfully demonstrated. This review will describe the metabolic pathways that lead to the diverse molecular features found in natural oleochemicals, highlight successful metabolic engineering strategies, and comment on areas where future work could further advance the field.

Synthetic biology

Oleochemical

Fatty acid

Biodisesel

Metabolic engineering

Author

B. F. Pfleger

University of Wisconsin Madison

Michael Gossing

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Jens B Nielsen

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Metabolic Engineering

1096-7176 (ISSN) 1096-7184 (eISSN)

Vol. 29 1-11

Industrial Systems Biology of Yeast and A. oryzae (INSYSBIO)

European Commission (EC) (EC/FP7/247013), 2010-01-01 -- 2014-12-31.

Areas of Advance

Life Science Engineering (2010-2018)

Subject Categories

Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.ymben.2015.01.009

More information

Latest update

7/12/2021