Dear Colleagues,

Protein is among the most important kinds of biomolecules to have evolved in the process of sustaining life. These days, with the unleashing of their functional potential, proteins are becoming increasingly important to our world, acting as industrial biocatalysts, food and nutrients, therapeutic agents, biomaterial, and finding a variety of other uses. Additionally, more and more protein-derived products are being developed for new application. To cope with this emerging trend, efficient and low-cost synthesis of protein is in high demanding. Microbial synthesis is a prevalent way to produce proteins of wide interest and with many advantages. Microbes can synthesize a great variety of natural or unnatural proteins with complicated structures and long chains beyond chemical synthesis. Microbial cells are also generally easier to grow at low cost compared to other cells such as the animal cells. Despite these factors, microbial protein synthesis still encounters certain challenges and continuous efforts have been made to improve the production efficiency and reduce production cost, whether by fine-tuning the translation machinery, enhancing protein transport or secretion pathways, the applying dynamic control to global metabolic fluxes, and developing cost-effective fermentation process.

The goal of this Special Issue is to publish recent research results as well as review papers on synthesis machinery, fermentation production, function characterization, and the product development of various proteins (e.g., enzyme, pharmaceutical protein, food ingredient, protein material) from microbial systems (e.g., bacterium, yeast, filamentous fungus, mushroom culture). The synthesis of protein through cell-free extracts and the engineering of protein behaviours (e.g., phase separation, aggregation, self-assembly) in microbial cells are also of interest.

Dr. Dong Liu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fermentation is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• protein expression
• protein secretion
• molecular chaperone
• recombinant protein
• heterologous expression
• alternative protein
• precision fermentation
• continuous fermentation
• microbial cell factories