Synthetic Biology Applied to Carbon Conservative and Carbon Dioxide Recycling Pathways

Abstract

The global warming conjugated with our reliance to petrol derived processes and products have raised strong concern about the future of our planet, asking urgently to find sustainable substitute solutions to decrease this reliance and annihilate this climate change mainly due to excess of CO 2 emission. In this regard, the exploitation of microorganisms as microbial cell factories able to convert non-edible but renewable carbon sources into biofuels and commodity chemicals appears as an attractive solution. However, there is still a long way to go to make this solution economically viable and to introduce the use of microorganisms as one of the motor of the forthcoming bio-based economy. In this review, we address a scientific issue that must be challenged in order to improve the value of microbial organisms as cell factories. This issue is related to the capability of microbial systems to optimize carbon conservation during their metabolic processes. This initiative, which can be addressed nowadays using the advances in Synthetic Biology, should lead to an increase in products yield per carbon assimilated which is a key performance indice in biotechnological processes, as well as to indirectly contribute to a reduction of CO 2 emission.

Reflections on the 2nd International Congress on NanoBioEngineering 2020

“…Next, François et al discussed the challenges to cost-effective production from renewable carbon sources. He described different ways his research group has redesigned metabolic pathways in microorganisms to exploit them to convert non-edible renewable carbon sources into biofuels and commodity chemicals (François et al, 2019 ). Next, Malci et al described how the combination of low-cost automation tools and complex molecular biology and genome editing methodologies would catapult our ability to strategically designed cell factories with a la carte biological pathways that produce specialty chemicals for all industrial sectors (Malci et al, 2020 ).…”

Fine tuning the glycolytic flux ratio of EP-bifido pathway for mevalonate production by enhancing glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (Zwf) and CRISPRi suppressing 6-phosphofructose kinase (PfkA) in Escherichia coli

“…Many unnatural pathways have been constructed, such as CETCH [ 7 ], MCG [ 8 ], NOG [ 9 ], MOG [ 10 ], and so on. These pathways provide a variety of new ideas to use CO 2 or one-carbon chemicals as carbon sources, and rewire metabolic pathways [ 11 , 12 ].…”

Fine tuning the glycolytic flux ratio of EP-bifido pathway for mevalonate production by enhancing glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (Zwf) and CRISPRi suppressing 6-phosphofructose kinase (PfkA) in Escherichia coli

“…Many unnatural pathways have been constructed, such as CETCH [7], MCG [8], NOG [9], MOG [10], and so on. These pathways provide a variety of new ideas to use CO 2 or one-carbon chemicals as carbon sources, and rewire metabolic pathways [11,12].…”