ABSTRACT
Biofuels emerge as attractive alternates to the non-renewable fossil fuels since they can be produced using a wide range of renewable resources and have lower impact on the environment. Microorganisms play a crucial role in the production of sustainable biofuels. Various groups of microbes such as bacteria, yeasts, and fungi have innate capabilities to generate various value-added products through their metabolic machinery. Currently, the most predominant biofuel is the sugar- and starch-based ethanol produced using yeasts. However, the increasing interest towards biofuel production from non-edible crops has shifted the research focus towards new advanced biofuels, feedstocks, and microbial hosts. The main challenge for the commercialization of biofuel industries is the lack of high-yielding robust strains that can thrive in harsh environmental conditions prevailing in the fermentation industries. Nevertheless, the various technological advances in genetic and metabolic engineering have made it possible to address these issues by extracting the functional genes or pathways from the wild species and inserting them into suitable hosts with improved characteristics. This chapter describes the different genera of microbial strains involved in high-yield biofuel production and discusses the means of their selection, optimization, and improvement for enhanced biofuel production.
