Microbial Biocatalysis

<p>Biocatalysis is a sustainable alternative for the chemical industry in manufacturing monitoring and waste management. Biocatalytic processes perform with isolated enzymes or whole cells as biocatalysts. Whole-cell biocatalysts offer some unique advantages of cascade reactions catalyzed by multienzymes as well as a single bioredox reaction with cofactor regeneration in a single strain. Therefore whole-cell biocatalysts are widely applied for biosynthesis/biotransformation to produce value-added chemicals as well as the complete mineralization of organic pollutants.</p><p>Biological catalytic processing using whole-cell biocatalysts includes biocatalyst engineering bio-reaction engineering and downstream processing. In addition to the traditional screening of microbial strains and immobilized whole-cell biocatalysts modern genetic engineering metabolic engineering and synthetic biology make tailored whole-cell biocatalysts possible. At the same time some integrated processes have successfully been applied in the catalytic processing using living whole-cell biocatalysts such as harnessing biocompatible chemistry to interface with the microbial metabolism as well as using various separation techniques for in situ product removal.</p><p>This reprint on Microbial Biocatalysis provides a comprehensive overview of the recent developments of catalyst discovery catalyst modification and process intensification for whole cell catalysis in fermentation biotransformation or biodegradation processes.</p>