Emerging trends in microbial fermentation technologies

Abstract Microbial fermentation technology is a promising, rapidly growing, revolutionary field involving the use of microbes for the production of compounds that are of immense use in the production of biofuels, pharmaceutical, environmentally friendly materials, energy, fine chemicals, and the food industry. This technology has been used in the manufacture of highly valued products for decades, but there is an urgent need to significantly accelerate the advancement of microbial fermentation technology to make the transition to a bio-based society. Moreover, there is always a great deal of interest and demand for the production of new microbial fermentation processes for certain essential purposes, such as the possibility to generate novel molecules and the sustainability factor. In this chapter, we review recent advances and trends in system biology-led metabolic engineering strategies, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, fluxomics, metabolic modeling on the genome scale, recent developments in expression systems, upstream process development, downstream process development, and pathway design in microbial fermentation technology.