Synthetic Engineering of Acetogens and Biohydrocarbons Production

Single carbon substrate gases, such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, play a significant role in global climate change. The fixation and reprocessing of single carbon substrate gases have been the subject of numerous studies to reduce these gases in environment and recycle them to useful molecules. A promising approach to overcome these challenges is to use microorganisms as biocatalysts to transform gases from single carbon substrates into compounds with higher values. Acetogenic microorganisms have gain considerable attention as biocatalysts because of their unique Wood-Ljungdahl (WL) pathway, which facilitates the fixation of both CO2, CO along with H2. Recently, the fermentation of single-carbon substrate gases to metabolites and biochemical at large scale has not been commercialized yet and has certain limitations. But the acetogens having high versatile metabolic pathway, high gases substrate solubility, and requiring less energy in biochemical reactions are the future prospective hopes. This chapter focuses on brief introduction, pathway, physiology, and synthetic engineering the Wood-Ljungdahl (WL) pathway route for the development of standard recombinant strains and for conversion of single carbon substrates and C1 gases into useful bioproducts. It is possible to engineer this pathway in order to produce biohydrocarbons. The synthetic engineering of acetogens is a promising approach for the production of various biohydrocarbons from syngas and waste carbon sources. Although, the process needs more research, explore future strategies for making synthetic acetogens capable of high yield at optimize conditions to make the industrial process economically feasible.