Recent Developments in Fungal Biotechnology for Bioenergy Production: Challenges and Perspectives

Fungi are a well-known game-changing paradigm for sustainable bioenergy and bioproduct production. Fungal biotech has catalyzed the shift from petroleum-based refineries to sustainable conversion of renewable raw materials, such as corn, grasses, or wood chips. In this review, recent progress in this field is summarized, focusing on the co-utilization of robust fungal strains and metabolic engineering for improving lignocellulosic biomass conversion. We have described several key advancements in fermentation technology and bioconversion process developments, with implications of synergistic interactions between microbes and the use of synthetic biology tools such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)  toward maximizing biofuel production. Despite the remarkable capacities of fungi to advance a circular economy and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this sector is confronted with formidable technical limitations as well as economic and regulatory constraints. High cost of enzyme production, scale-up difficulties, and the challenges associated with handling genetically modified organisms are substantial hurdles for large-scale commercialization. The discussion on the growing visions of the fungal cultures with the induction of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and other renewable sources, for example, solar and wind energy, is also done in this chapter. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary collaborations are also explained to enable the maximum output from the model innovations. They are considered a critical key to unlock the full potential of fungal biotechnology to eradicate the problem of climate change and to create a future of robust bioenergy.