Abstract
Increasing concerns of environmental impacts and global warming calls for urgent need to switch from use of fossil fuels to renewable technologies. Biofuels represent attractive alternatives of fossil fuels and have gained continuous attentions. Through the use of synthetic biology it has become possible to engineer microbial cell factories for efficient biofuel production in a more precise and efficient manner. Here, we review advances on yeast-based biofuel production. Following an overview of synthetic biology impacts on biofuel production, we review recent advancements on the design, build, test, learn steps of yeast-based biofuel production, and end with discussion of challenges associated with use of synthetic biology for developing novel processes for biofuel production.
Highlights
The rapid increase in green-house gas (GHG) emissions due to the extensive use of fossil resources have necessitated the production of renewable energy sources to sustain current economic activities while reducing net carbon dioxide emission
Compared with other renewable energies, including solar, wind, tidal, thermal and hydro energies, biofuels produced through biorefineries relies on combustion to release its energy, and it is storable and compatible with the current fossil fuel infrastructures
Synthetic biology aims to integrate biology, mathematics, chemistry, biophysics, and automation, to construct synthetic enzymes, circuits, pathways, chromosomes and organisms in a systematic, modular and standardized fashion [2]. It has advanced biofuel production through accelerating the speed of strain engineering resulting in prototype strains that can be evaluated for industrial production
Summary
The rapid increase in green-house gas (GHG) emissions due to the extensive use of fossil resources have necessitated the production of renewable energy sources to sustain current economic activities while reducing net carbon dioxide emission. Synthetic biology aims to integrate biology, mathematics, chemistry, biophysics, and automation, to construct synthetic enzymes, circuits, pathways, chromosomes and organisms in a systematic, modular and standardized fashion [2]. It has advanced biofuel production through accelerating the speed of strain engineering resulting in prototype strains that can be evaluated for industrial production. Design for biofuel production The design stage of synthetic biology involves model construction [5], data mining [6], the sequence design of synthetic promoters [7], terminators [8], enzymes [9], the metabolic design of pathways and metabolisms [10], as well as the process design of cell production and fermentation [11] (Figure 1). The conversion of feedstocks into biofuels is a nonlinear and multiscale process, and mass conservation, the supply www.sciencedirect.com
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