Chapter 11 – Synthetic Biology of Microbial Biofuel Production: From Enzymes to Pathways to Organisms

Engineering microbes to produce fuels is a natural application for synthetic biology, and indeed, many published examples demonstrate its suitability. However, a greater challenge is achieving the production of biofuels on an economical scale, a formidable undertaking which will need all of the tools and tricks of synthetic biology. Here, we describe methods taken from synthetic biology that have been successfully applied to both demonstrate production and improve yields of either fuels or other small molecules. These methods address many aspects of microbial fuel production: pathway design and manipulation, protein activity, and host engineering.