Metabolic Engineering Strategies to Enhance Microbial Production of Biopolymers

Abstract

Biopolymers are used as plastics, packaging material, clothing, absorbent material, medical textiles, and in medical and health care sector (pharmaceutical, tissue engineering). The multitude of applications requires that biopolymers be produced in large quantity. However, limited availability of the majority of biopolymers or cumbersome extraction process from natural sources poses significant hurdles in realizing their true potential as a commodity product. Microbial fermentation for production is a highly sought process for large-scale production of biopolymers with desired characteristics. However, this method is also limited by lack of high-producing microbial strain, poorly understood production pathway, and difficult product recovery after fermentation. Metabolic engineering has become an indispensable tool to modify the production pathway in microbes for large-scale production of the targeted product. In combination with systems biology, synthetic biology, and evolutionary engineering strategies, metabolic engineering has enabled the current researchers and scientists to engineer high-performance industrially competitive strain with precision. This chapter describes metabolic engineering strategies in combination with the current state-of-the-art techniques and tools applied for enhancing various biopolymer production recovery and purification. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.