Abstract
Microbial conversion of renewable, lignocellulosic substrates to fuel and platform chemical intermediates offers a sustainable route to establish a viable bioeconomy. However, such approaches face a series of key technical, economic, and sustainability hurdles, including: incomplete substrate utilization, lignocellulosic hydrolysate and/or end-product toxicity, inefficient product recovery, incompatible cultivation requirements, and insufficient productivity metrics. Development of a production host with native traits suitable for high productivity conversion of lignocellulosic substrates under process-relevant conditions offers a means to bypass the above-described hurdles and accelerate the development of microbial biocatalyst deployment. Clostridium tyrobutyricum, a native producer of short chain fatty acids, displays a series of characteristics that make it an ideal candidate for conversion of lignocellulosic substrates and thus represents a promising host for microbial production of diverse carboxylate-derived product suites. Herein, we review recent progress and future directions in the development of this bacterium as an industrial microbial cell factory, with emphases on the utilization of lignocellulosic substrates and metabolic engineering approaches.
Highlights
Bio-derived carboxylic acids have long been identified as promising precursors for biofuels and bioproducts due to their inherent chemical functionality (Guarnieri et al, 2017)
One class of carboxylic acids that is of particular interest for green manufacturing are the volatile fatty acids (VFAs), or shortchain fatty acids (SCFA)
A series of metabolic engineering efforts have successfully been pursued in C. tyrobutyricum to increase butyrate biosynthesis, expand substrate utilization capacity, and rewire metabolism for the production of non-native metabolic intermediates (Zhu et al, 2005; Zhang et al, 2012; Yu et al, 2015b,c; Fu et al, 2017b; Figure 2 and Table 1)
Summary
Bio-derived carboxylic acids have long been identified as promising precursors for biofuels and bioproducts due to their inherent chemical functionality (Guarnieri et al, 2017). A series of metabolic engineering efforts have successfully been pursued in C. tyrobutyricum to increase butyrate biosynthesis, expand substrate utilization capacity, and rewire metabolism for the production of non-native metabolic intermediates (Zhu et al, 2005; Zhang et al, 2012; Yu et al, 2015b,c; Fu et al, 2017b; Figure 2 and Table 1).
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