[an error occurred while processing this directive]

HEREDITAS ›› 2011, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (10): 1121-1133.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1005.2011.01121

• en • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Genetic engineering of microbial metabolic pathway for production of advanced biodiesel

FU Ai-Si, LIU Ran, ZHU Jing, LIU Tian-Gang   

  1. Key Laboratory of Combinatorial Biosynthesis and Drug Discovery, Ministry of Education, School of Pharmaceutical Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, China
  • Received:2011-04-18 Revised:2011-08-05 Online:2011-10-20 Published:2011-10-25

Abstract: Biodiesel is a renewable biofuel and alternative diesel, but the first generation of biodiesel, which has many defects in properties and in production methods, mainly comes from the chemical transesterification of triglyceride from plant oil. With the fast development in the field of synthetic biology and metabolic engineer-ing, the researchers can choose suitable microbes and engineer its metabolic pathways, such as fatty acid bio-synthesis pathway and isoprenoid biosynthesis pathway, to directly produce the second generation of advanced biodiesel---long chain hydrocarbons, which have better properties and quality using the newest biotechnology techniques. In this review, we summarized the research progress about microbial production of advanced bio-diesel and also pointed the deficiencies and future direction in this new field.

Key words: advanced biodiesel, fatty acid pathway, isoprenoid pathway, metabolic engineering, synthetic biology