The application of microfluidic-based technologies in the cycle of metabolic engineering

Synthetic Biology Advanced Natural Product Discovery

A wide variety of bacteria, fungi and plants can produce bioactive secondary metabolites, which are often referred to as natural products. With the rapid development of DNA sequencing technology and bioinformatics, a large number of putative biosynthetic gene clusters have been reported. However, only a limited number of natural products have been discovered, as most biosynthetic gene clusters are not expressed or are expressed at extremely low levels under conventional laboratory conditions. With the rapid development of synthetic biology, advanced genome mining and engineering strategies have been reported and they provide new opportunities for discovery of natural products. This review discusses advances in recent years that can accelerate the design, build, test, and learn (DBTL) cycle of natural product discovery, and prospects trends and key challenges for future research directions.

Prospects for the Improvement of Bioethanol and Biohydrogen Production from Mixed Starch-Based Agricultural Wastes

The need for fossil fuel alternatives keeps increasing. Bioethanol and biohydrogen have emerged as significant renewable options. However, these bioprocess routes have presented various challenges, which constantly impede commercialization. Most of these bottlenecks are hinged on feedstock logistics, low biofuel yield and enormous process costs. Meanwhile, a large output of renewable energy can be generated from mixed starch-based agricultural wastes due to their intrinsic bioenergy characteristics. This study, therefore, focuses on the production of bioethanol and biohydrogen from mixed starch-based agricultural wastes. The content further highlights the current challenges of their individual processes and elucidates the prospects for improvement, through an integrated biofuel approach. The use of mixed starch-based agricultural wastes as substrates for integrated bioethanol and biohydrogen production was proposed. Furthermore, the use of mixture-based experimental design for the determination of optimal values of critical factors influencing biofuel production emerges as a viable prospect for profitable bioethanol production from the starch-based biomass. Additionally, biohydrogen production from effluents of the mixed starch-based waste bioethanol looked promising. Thus, the study proposed valuable insights towards achieving a cost-effective biofuel technology.

Advances and prospects in metabolic engineering of Zymomonas mobilis

Biorefinery of biomass-based biofuels and biochemicals by microorganisms is a competitive alternative of traditional petroleum refineries. Zymomonas mobilis is a natural ethanologen with many desirable characteristics, which makes it an ideal industrial microbial biocatalyst for commercial production of desirable bioproducts through metabolic engineering. In this review, we summarize the metabolic engineering progress achieved in Z. mobilis to expand its substrate and product ranges as well as to enhance its robustness against stressful conditions such as inhibitory compounds within the lignocellulosic hydrolysates and slurries. We also discuss a few metabolic engineering strategies that can be applied in Z. mobilis to further develop it as a robust workhorse for economic lignocellulosic bioproducts. In addition, we briefly review the progress of metabolic engineering in Z. mobilis related to the classical synthetic biology cycle of "Design-Build-Test-Learn", as well as the progress and potential to develop Z. mobilis as a model chassis for biorefinery practices in the synthetic biology era.