Editorial: Pathway, Genetic and Process Engineering of Microbes for Biopolymer Synthesis
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Date
2020-12
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Idioma
en
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Publisher
Frontiers Media S.A.
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Abstract
Together with the climate crisis, the heavy accumulation in oceans and soils of persistent pollutants,
like polycyclic aromatics hydrocarbons and synthetic plastics, are the main drivers to impact
nature and threaten human survival. It is particularly striking that most industrial polymers
still originate from petrochemical sources—nearly 99% of the overall worldwide production. The
result is materials that remain intact for centuries once deposited in the environment. Relying on
non-renewable fossil chemicals limits our ability to establish a circular economy that promises to
curb current emissions and contribute moderately to the global carbon cycle without surpassing its
carrying capacity.
For decades, commercial biopolymers have also been produced by microbial fermentation since
nature has endowed many bacteria from urban sites to extreme environments (Orellana-Saez et
al., 2019) with the enzymatic machinery to assemble these macromolecules. Despite the rapid
pace of innovation, microbial biopolymers are still expensive to synthesize because the generally
oxygen-intensive fermentation processes, downstream processing, and carbon feedstock cost boost
production expenses (Oliveira et al., 2020). The biopolymers must additionally possess specific
mechanical and physical properties to be processed industrially into products with a variety of
applications (Moradali and Rehm, 2020).
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Indexación Scopus
Keywords
Polyhydroxyalkanoates, Cupriavidus Necator, Burkholderia Sacchari, Succinic and lactic acid, Metabolic engineering
Citation
Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, Open Access, Volume 823 December 2020 Article number 618383
DOI
10.3389/fbioe.2020.618383