Dear Colleagues,

In the past two years, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic led to a huge negative impact on global crude oil production and transportation; on the other hand, the economic recovery of some countries continued to increase the demand for crude oil. Most recently, the international political situation has led to a sharp rise in crude oil prices. In addition, as many countries’ policies to address climate change come into effect, carbon emission have gradually tightened. Therefore, the cheap and renewable one carbon (C1) substrates (including CO, CO₂, methane, methanal, methanoic acid, methanol) have generated increasing attention as abundantly available feedstock for biotransformation to produce biofuels and valuable chemicals. Developing C1-based microbial cell factories, such as Escherichia coli, Corynebacterium, methanogens, brewer's yeast, clostridia, oleaginous yeast, and algae, is meaningful and of great significance. 

Unfortunately, the performance of the C1-based microbial cell factory, including substrate utilization capacity, product synthesis efficiency (i.e., titer, yield, and productivity), and tolerance to inhibitors and products are still putative bottlenecks toward industrial production and commercialization.

We have noted recent breakthroughs of synthetic biotechnology in genome editing tools development, and the acquisition and analysis of massive omics data have made it possible to recruit genetic elements across species and reshape chassis cells at the molecular level. Accordingly, the metabolic pathways or functional modules could be restructured, debugged, and applied in classic and even some non-model strains. More importantly, the synthetic microbial community learning from natural symbiosis phenomena holds great promise in syngas biofixation and C1 compound utilization through the division of metabolic labor and construction of cross-species metabolic pathways.

The overall goal of this Special Issue is to gather recent progress in C1-based microbial cell factory development driven by synthetic biotechnology and other technique. The scope of the special issue covers new discoveries, strategies, and methods to accelerate product development, feedstock utilization, strains performance optimization, and synthetic consortium regulation. This topic is committed to the publication of original research and review articles.

Dr. Zhiqiang Wen
Dr. Naief H. Al Makishah
Guest Editors

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• C1 compounds
• fermentation
• metabolic engineering
• genetic system
• microbial cell factory
• synthetic biology
• bioreactor
• syngas
• biofixation
• carbon-neutral