Fermenting industrial gases: a new frontier for Metabolic Engineering and Industrial Biotechnology

Industrial biotechnology has been founded on, mostly, the use of sugars as substrate, although other organic compounds have also been used depending on availability and technology to efficiently utilize such compounds. As a result, the preponderance of efforts in metabolic engineering have been focused on the use of such primary feedstocks and the engineering of microbes for their effective conversion to useful products. The problem with such substrates, especially in the context of biofuel production but also generally, is that they are expensive, unavailable in aggregate form (due their broad distribution), and, in certain cases, compete with food production. These shortcomings present difficulties in scaling up such operations to scales required for meaningful impact in the fuels and chemicals industries.

In this talk I will explore the possibility of using gases to alleviate the above problems. Microbes have been used before in aerobic and anaerobic fermentations of gases as energy and carbon source. Metabolic engineering of microbes to allow them to directly utilizing gases or their derivatives opens up the possibility of deploying such processes for large-scale production of fuels and chemicals due to the availability of gaseous feedstocks in sufficient quantities in a single location. Examples for the production of lipids and other chemicals will be presented to illustrate the potential of this new feedstock with significant benefits for the economy and the environment.