Elsevier

Metabolic Engineering

Volume 28, March 2015, Pages 223-239
Metabolic Engineering

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Biorefineries for the production of top building block chemicals and their derivatives

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymben.2014.12.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The status of top 12 chemicals listed in the 2004 DOE report is reviewed.

  • The status of top 10 chemicals revised in the 2010 report is also reviewed.

  • Most of these chemicals have been or are being commercialized.

  • Metabolic engineering is essential for maximizing the strain performance.

  • The era of bio-based production of chemicals from renewable biomass is coming.

Abstract

Due to the growing concerns on the climate change and sustainability on petrochemical resources, DOE selected and announced the bio-based top 12 building blocks and discussed the needs for developing biorefinery technologies to replace the current petroleum based industry in 2004. Over the last 10 years after its announcement, many studies have been performed for the development of efficient technologies for the bio-based production of these chemicals and derivatives. Now, ten chemicals among these top 12 chemicals, excluding the l-aspartic acid and 3-hydroxybutyrolactone, have already been commercialized or are close to commercialization. In this paper, we review the current status of biorefinery development for the production of these platform chemicals and their derivatives. In addition, current technological advances on industrial strain development for the production of platform chemicals using micro-organisms will be covered in detail with case studies on succinic acid and 3-hydroxypropionic acid as examples.

Introduction

The development of technologies for establishing successful biorefineries has been actively pursued in order to substitute the current petrochemical technologies based on fossil resources. In 2004, the U.S. department of energy (DOE) selected top 12 platform chemicals that can be produced from biomass (Werpy et al., 2004) (Fig. 1). These chemicals can be produced via microbial fermentation or simple chemical process starting from sugars and can be further converted to other valuable or commodity products. After 6 years since its publication in the DOE report, an update was made, that selected a few novel bio-based platform chemicals based on the new criteria (Bozell and Petersen, 2010). The major difference in the updated 2010 report was that certain chemicals with lesser growth market were removed and new chemicals with high potential in industries were additionally selected (Bozell and Petersen, 2010). Since the first DOE report was published, a number of biorefinery processes have been commercialized or are getting close to commercialization.

The most important factor in commercialization of biorefinery process based on microbial fermentation is that the production process should be economically competitive with petroleum refinery process. Thus, it is important to maximize the performance of micro-organism with respect to the titer, productivity and yield of the desired product. In this paper, we review the current technological achievements and progress on the commercialization for the production of top value added building blocks and their derivatives. Also, the metabolic engineering strategies for developing high performance strains toward the commercialization of biorefinery process are reviewed using the case studies on microbial production of succinic and 3-hydroxypropionic acids.

Section snippets

Succinic acid

Succinic acid was selected as one of the top bio-based chemicals both in 2004 and 2010 reports. It is a four carbon (C4) dicarboxylic acid and can be easily produced through microbial fermentation. As a platform chemical, it can be chemically converted to many other valuable chemicals such as 1,4-butanediol (1,4-BDO), gamma-butyrolactone (GBL), tetrahydrofuran (THF) and N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) by simple chemical processes (Zeikus et al., 1999). The current market size for succinic acid itself

Case studies on the development of industrial strains

The most important factors to be considered in developing successful biorefinery process include development of high performance strains, economical pretreatment of substrates, efficient raw material logistics, highly efficient fermentation operation and downstream processes, and waste treatment. In the case of development of improved strains, the important factors are the titer, yield, and productivity of the desired bioproduct. Therefore, strain development process should be focused on

Conclusions

Since the publication of the U.S. DOE report on promising top 12 building block chemicals, many studies have been carried out to develop microbial strains and accompanying bioprocesses for their industrial production. As evident from what have been described above, the bio-based production of these chemicals and many others in industrial-scale is not unreal. Many companies around the world have been producing and are about to produce several platform chemicals and their derivatives from biomass

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Tong Un Chae, Jung Ho Ahn, Yu Sung Ko and Yu Sin Jang for helpful discussion. This work was supported by the Technology Development Program to Solve Climate Changes on Systems Metabolic Engineering for Biorefineries from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP) through the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea (NRF-2012-C1AAA001-2012M1A2A2026556).

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    These authors contributed equally to this work.

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