Recent Advances in the Metabolic Engineering of Klebsiella pneumoniae: A Potential Platform Microorganism for Biorefineries

The production of industrial chemicals from renewable biomass resources is a promising solution to overcome the society’s dependence on petroleum and to mitigate the pollution resulting from petroleum processing. Klebsiella pneumoniae is a nutritionally versatile bacterium with numerous native pathways for the production of well-known and industrially important platform chemicals derived from various sugars. Genomic sequence analyses have shown that the K. pneumoniae genome has a high similarity with that of Escherichia coli, the most studied organism, which is used in industrial biotechnology processes for fuel and chemical production. Hence, K. pneumoniae can be considered as a promising platform microorganism that can be metabolically engineered for the high-level production of bio-based chemicals. This review highlights the substrate metabolism and the metabolic engineering strategies developed in K. pneumoniae for the production of bio-based chemicals.