Improvement of Hydrogen Production through Molecular Approaches and Metabolic Engineering

Microorganisms possess several unique genetic and metabolic attributes in relevance to biohydrogen production. The knowledge of molecular basis of H2 production and application of genetic engineering could improve energy production phenotypes up to commercial levels. Different potential avenues of genetic manipulation would be the best way to create a platform for the economically feasible H2 production. Signicant advances in the development of genetic manipulation tools have recently been achieved with some bacterial, cyanobacterial, and microalgal systems, and they are being used to manipulate the central carbon metabolism skeleton, to improve their enzymatic activities, to redirect the metabolic pathways, and to introduce foreign genes within these organisms. Different strategies for genetic modication are given in Table 6.1.