5. Conclusion

Mankind has been using micro-organisms to produce compounds for food or industrial use for a long time, but this technique is now finding new meaning in the perspective of replacing fossil resources with natural ones. Since the 1990s and the beginnings of metabolic engineering, research and industry have been developing genetically modified micro-organisms for the production of new compounds by fermentation. As we have seen, genetic manipulation and modeling techniques from synthetic biology and molecular biology are making it possible to consider these problems more globally and rationally. We anticipate that the new generation of strains will offer significantly higher yields than their predecessors. Recent advances in the world of biofuels and organic acids show us that metabolic engineering is well on the way to becoming applicable on an industrial scale and competitive with conventional...