ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the subject of how recombinant DNA technology can be applied to the large-scale production of industrial chemicals, especially of commodity chemicals. It describes several features of enzymatic transformation, and also describes the problems and possibilities of this technology as a means for mass-production of industrial chemicals. The chapter deals with some topics in the biological process that have been fully developed or that are still being developed as industrial processes. It discusses future prospects relative to the application of recombinant DNA technology to commercial production of industrial chemicals. The use of microbes is usually preferred, rather than just the extracted enzyme, as a biological catalyst. Such features of enzymatic transformation seem to be more similar to chemical synthesis than to microbial fermentation. When the recombinant microbes expressing the plasmid-encoded 2,5-diketo-d-gluconic acid reductase were grown in the presence of glucose, 2-keto-l-gulonic acid was produced directly and released into the culture medium.
