Platform biochemicals for a biorenewable chemical industry

TLDR

The chemical industry relies on inexpensive petroleum-derived carbon to produce a limited set of platform chemicals, but recent developments are driving interest in renewable carbon sources. The authors argue that moving from fossil to renewable carbon could transform the chemical industry and that fundamental biological research into metabolism and biocatalysts may enable this shift. They illustrate this by proposing a platform technology that uses combinatorial biosynthesis to exploit the enzymatic flexibility of polyketide pathways.

Abstract

The chemical industry is currently reliant on a historically inexpensive, petroleum-based carbon feedstock that generates a small collection of platform chemicals from which highly efficient chemical conversions lead to the manufacture of a large variety of chemical products. Recently, a number of factors have coalesced to provide the impetus to explore alternative renewable sources of carbon. Here we discuss the potential impact on the chemical industry of shifting from non-renewable carbon sources to renewable carbon sources. This change to the manufacture of chemicals from biological carbon sources will provide an opportunity for the biological research community to contribute fundamental knowledge concerning carbon metabolism and its regulation. We discuss whether fundamental biological research into metabolic processes at a holistic level, made possible by completed genome sequences and integrated with detailed structural understanding of biocatalysts, can change the chemical industry from being dependent on fossil-carbon feedstocks to using biorenewable feedstocks. We illustrate this potential by discussing the prospect of building a platform technology based upon a concept of combinatorial biosynthesis, which would explore the enzymological flexibilities of polyketide biosynthesis.