Chapter 17 - Synthetic biology tools: Engineering microbes for biotechnological applications

Abstract

Microorganisms are ubiquitous and have proved themselves to be a sustainable biotechnological tool resolving the difficulty in engineering central dogma of life. Technologies and applications of altering microbe’s functions and makeup opened an era of new possibilities to improve human health and environment. These synthetic biological tools interact and interfere with regulatory mechanisms due to their unique catalytic activities, enabling them to use complex substrates, pathways compartmentalization and distribution of the molecular burden. The capability of rerouting the metabolic pathways to use carbon wastes like methane instead of sugars enables them to interfere with the surrounding environment. These tools have found their leading emergence in various fields like food and beverage industry, pharmaceuticals, biosynthetic pathways, sewage treatment plants, improving crop production, soil fertility, defense against pathogens from inexpensive carbon sources for millennia. Biotechnological engineering techniques have harnessed the microbes’ capacity to synthesize the compounds with best catalytic properties for the industrial applications. This chapter will focus on how biotechnological approaches lead to the build-up synthetic biology tools that have evolved the scientific world with their multiple applications.