Major metabolic engineering successes
Metabolic engineering and synthetic biology for green chemistry

The first and certainly the most developed application of metabolic engineering is biofuel production. The use and improvement of naturally ethanol-producing strains such as S. cerevisiae, C. acetobutylicum or Z. mobilis, or slightly modified strains, are at the heart of the development of first-generation fuels.

Using ethanol as the sole fuel poses a number of technical challenges. Firstly, its energy density is only 2/3 that of...