Carruthers David N, Lee Taek Soon
Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville, CA, United States.
Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States.
Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2022 Aug 23;10:968437. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2022.968437. eCollection 2022.
Advances in synthetic biology have radically changed our ability to rewire microorganisms and significantly improved the scalable production of a vast array of drop-in biopolymers and biofuels. The success of a drop-in bioproduct is contingent on market competition with petrochemical analogues and weighted upon relative economic and environmental metrics. While the quantification of comparative trade-offs is critical for accurate process-level decision making, the translation of industrial ecology to synthetic biology is often ambiguous and assessment accuracy has proven challenging. In this review, we explore strategies for evaluating industrial biotechnology through life cycle and techno-economic assessment, then contextualize how recent developments in synthetic biology have improved process viability by expanding feedstock availability and the productivity of microbes. By juxtaposing biological and industrial constraints, we highlight major obstacles between the disparate disciplines that hinder accurate process evaluation. The convergence of these disciplines is crucial in shifting towards carbon neutrality and a circular bioeconomy.
合成生物学的进展彻底改变了我们对微生物进行重新布线的能力，并显著提高了大量可直接替代的生物聚合物和生物燃料的规模化生产。一种可直接替代的生物产品的成功取决于与石化类似物的市场竞争，并由相关的经济和环境指标来衡量。虽然量化比较权衡对于准确的工艺层面决策至关重要，但工业生态学向合成生物学的转化往往不明确，而且评估准确性已被证明具有挑战性。在这篇综述中，我们探讨了通过生命周期和技术经济评估来评估工业生物技术的策略，然后阐述了合成生物学的最新进展如何通过扩大原料供应和提高微生物的生产力来改善工艺可行性。通过对比生物学和工业方面的限制因素，我们突出了不同学科之间阻碍准确工艺评估的主要障碍。这些学科的融合对于向碳中和和循环生物经济的转变至关重要。
