Chapter 17 - Metabolic Engineering and Molecular Biotechnology of Biohydrogen Production

Abstract

Hydrogen is evolving as one of the prime alternate fuels of the era. Microbial production of hydrogen is produced either by photo fermentation or dark fermentation. However, most of these technologies have several limitations to achieve the theoretical hydrogen yield from organic waste in terms of suitability of microbial species, fermentation conditions, long-term reactor performance, cometabolites generation, and hydrogen-consuming enzymes. To date, gene manipulation is ascertained to be a competent way to achieve the maximum hydrogen yield from microbiological reactions. Efficient biohydrogen yield requires insights into bacterial metabolism that can be provided by functional genomics approaches. Genomics is a huge potential on the improvement of hydrogen production, but, not on executing alternate way in the microbial process. Consequently, here we describe recent updates of genetic manipulation approaches that are being applied to enhancing biohydrogen production through fermentation processes. Besides that, different metabolic regulation of microbial hydrogen production, physiological features of species that involved the fermentation processes, potential role of hydrogen-producing enzymes, genetically related to the microbial process of fermentation, and recent advancements in research and development are outlined.