Metabolic engineering: Tools and applications

Other text in scientific journal, 2023

Metabolic engineering plays a pivotal role in the development of mi-crobial cell factories for efficient production of biofuels, chemicals, andnatural products, which facilitate the transition from fossil-resource de-pendent processes to green and sustainable bio-based processes. By do-ing so, we could address global challenges such as sustainability, humanhealth, and climate change. Significant progresses in economical chem-ical bioproduction have been accomplished by improving the physio-logical properties of microbial cells through metabolic engineering [1].However, to encourage a shift towards circular bio-economies, the per-formance of microbial cell factories must become more cost-effective.Therefore, there is a strong demand for innovative techniques that,upon application, can greatly speed up the classic design-build-test-learn(DBTL) cycle in metabolic engineering.This special issue was aimed to showcase some recent advances indeveloping novel synthetic biology tools and screening techniques formetabolic engineering, strategies on engineering of microbial cell fac-tories for sustainable feedstock utilization, and the production of repre-sentative chemicals.