ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses some of the ways to circumvent current obstacles standing in the way of converting efficiently complex biomass into biofuels. It focuses on four specific approaches that could contribute to improve microbial biofuel production and that reflect the authors' scientific interests: the rational design of robust enzymes and tolerant strains; the use of natural or engineered microbial consortia for fuel production; the production of biofuels by microbial electrosynthesis (MES); and development of more efficient dynamic macroscopic models of conversion bioprocesses. The term biofuel encompasses a wide variety of products: bioethanol, biodiesel, biogas, biohydrogen, biomethanol, biomethyl-ether, biobutanol, and so on. Among the various features that are expected to be improvable by genetic engineering, the increase of biofuel tolerance in engineered microbes appears as an important challenge for success of biofuel production at the industrial scale. Metagenomics is the analysis of the metagenome, that is, the collection of genomes, of a given microbial community at a given point in time.