iCULTURE Scientific Review Examines Bacterial Production of Valuable Chemicals from Renewable Resources
The EU-funded iCULTURE project published a scientific review in “Current Opinion in Biotechnology”, examining how bacteria can be engineered to produce valuable chemicals through fermentation, offering alternatives to production routes based on fossil resources.
Titled “Aromatic compound production by Corynebacterium glutamicum: unified strategies at the core and diversity by extension”, the publication is authored by partners Nora Junker, Sara-Sophie Poethe and Volker F. Wendisch from Bielefeld University, Germany.
Aromatic compounds are a broad family of chemicals used in sectors ranging from food and pharmaceuticals to plastics. Many of these compounds can be made through biological processes, such as bacterial fermentation, using microorganisms to transform sugars from different sources (including renewable ones) into useful products.
The review focuses on Corynebacterium glutamicum, a bacterium already widely used in industrial biotechnology. It examines how researchers can adapt the bacterium’s internal production pathways to make a variety of aromatic compounds. To make this possible, researchers guide metabolism such that the bacterium converts nutrients into the desired product. This approach, known as metabolic engineering, helps turn microorganisms into biological production systems that can transform renewable inputs into valuable chemicals. The review brings together strategies for developing these systems and also discusses microbial consortia (a specific article has been published by iCULTURE partners here), in which C. glutamicum works alongside other microorganisms.
Previous work has demonstrated aromatic compound production using glucose and sugar-containing liquids obtained by breaking down orange peel. These examples illustrate the potential to use biological resources, including processing residues, as inputs for chemical production.
This perspective is particularly relevant to iCULTURE, which aims to transform seaweed-derived resources into valuable bio-based products. The strategies discussed in the review could support the development of bacterial strains able to produce valuable compounds from sugars released from seaweed. Extending these approaches to seaweed-derived feedstocks is a promising development opportunity, connecting the publication to the project’s ambition to build a sustainable, circular seaweed value chain.