Genetic Engineering Approaches for High-End Application of Biopolymers: Advances and Future Prospects

The role of genetic engineering in the development of novel biopolymers has a massive impact on various innovative scopes in biomedical research and also have other industrial applications. Genetic manipulation of non-replica microorganisms is still challenging due to organism-specific variations that hinder universal central dogma or molecular genetics tools, translatable knowledge of intracellular biochemical pathways and their regulatory mechanisms. A better understanding of the essential processes involved in the biosynthesis of microbial polymer and their regulation has created a starting point for metabolic and protein-engineering approaches to improve economic-production efficiency with highly applicable biopolymer properties. On the basis of molecular genetics, sequence, folded structure, molecular weight, and stereochemistry of protein polymers advocate a view for the synthesis of protein-based genetically engineered biopolymers. Genetically engineered microbial polymers have a huge area of research over the last 15 years and advances like CRISPR, genetic engineering-driven coassembly of synthetic bacterial cells and magnetic nanoparticles for capturing heavy metals, cyanobacterial extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), etc., come into sight as an alternative to address biotechnological and biomedical challenges and also boosting biomaterial research. Here, we encapsulated the key aspects of biopolymers (microbial polymers) production and give a brief outline about the approaches used for biopolymer synthesis and their advances that can lead to increased use of biopolymers as valuable renewable products.