Abstract
The idea of renewable and regenerative resources has inspired research for more than a hundred years. Ideally, the only spent energy will replenish itself, like plant material, sunlight, thermal energy or wind. Biodiesel or ethanol are examples, since their production relies mainly on plant material. However, it has become apparent that crop derived biofuels will not be sufficient to satisfy future energy demands. Thus, especially in the last decade a lot of research has focused on the production of next generation biofuels. A major subject of these investigations has been the microbial fatty acid biosynthesis with the aim to produce fatty acids or derivatives for substitution of diesel. As an industrially important organism and with the best studied microbial fatty acid biosynthesis, Escherichia coli has been chosen as producer in many of these studies and several reviews have been published in the fields of E. coli fatty acid biosynthesis or biofuels. However, most reviews discuss only one of these topics in detail, despite the fact, that a profound understanding of the involved enzymes and their regulation is necessary for efficient genetic engineering of the entire pathway. The first part of this review aims at summarizing the knowledge about fatty acid biosynthesis of E. coli and its regulation, and it provides the connection towards the production of fatty acids and related biofuels. The second part gives an overview about the achievements by genetic engineering of the fatty acid biosynthesis towards the production of next generation biofuels. Finally, the actual importance and potential of fatty acid-based biofuels will be discussed.
Highlights
During the recent decades it has become evident that the world’s fossil fuel reserves are decreasing and will be most probably depleted rather soon
The objective of this review is to focus on the biosynthesis of fatty acids in the fast growing and industrially important microorganism E. coli
Of the products that were discussed in this review, free fatty acids and PHAs from genetically engineered E. coli were the subject of most studies and have consequentely yielded the best results
Summary
During the recent decades it has become evident that the world’s fossil fuel reserves are decreasing and will be most probably depleted rather soon. Most studies conclude that the overall environmental impact of biodiesel is negative [12], due to the use of fertilizers for growing the oil plants and the transesterification process, which is energy consuming and relies on the use of toxic methanol [11] Another drawback of currently used biofuels is that to date all economically feasible processes are based on the utilization of cereal crops (for example, wheat, and maize), oil crops (for example rape, palm oil and soya) or sugar crops (for example, sugar beet and sugar cane) [6,13]. Because the degradation of fatty acids yields a high amount of ATP and reducing equivalents, they represent a suitable storage compound for energy and carbon.
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