Microbial bio-production of proteins and valuable metabolites

Abstract

Microbes are widely utilized as workhorses for production of numerous valuable metabolites with utility in different sectors including food, energy, environment, agriculture, health, and disease management. Microbes are capable of synthesizing spectrum of structurally divergent compounds, which are even difficult to be prepared by chemical synthesis. Microbes synthesize many metabolites of interest naturally as an intermediate/product of their metabolic pathways, or another approach is redesigning/creating biosynthetic pathways in microbes for production of non-native target metabolite from simple and cheap substrates not only at laboratory scale but also at the industrial scale. Advancements in genetic engineering, genome sequencing, transcriptomics, proteomics, and computational approaches have revolutionized the identification of novel bioactive molecules of microbial origin and redesigning of microbial biosynthetic pathways. The present book chapter focuses primarily on microbial products including enzymes, proteins, chemicals, and secondary metabolites as well as their production strategies, their application in various fields, and development of engineered microbes as production factories.