About this Research Topic

Background

Climate change drives the development of bio-based sustainable product lines in the pharmaceutical, food, energy and chemical industry sector. To that end the development of waste free, cyclic bio-refineries are at the core for a global deployment of a sustainable, bio-based economy. The development of new bio-processes that can ultimately be assembled into cyclic bio-refinery settings requires a high degree of cooperation of interdisciplinary project teams.

In that regard, industrial biotechnology combines competencies in biology, chemistry, engineering sciences and most recently informatics to model and predict bioprocesses prior to their implementation.

This Research Topic, based on the Industrial Biotechnology Forum (http://ibf-conference.org) held on March 13-14, 2018 at the Campus Garching of the Technical University of Munich - a prime showcase of the latest scientific developments in the area of industrial biotechnology, is open to all researcher in the field of Biotechnology to encompass scientific developments along the entire process chain.

The main topic involved in the process front end is Enzyme Engineering to adapt enzyme systems to required process conditions, enhance target product yields or generate enzyme cascade to access a new chemical space not commonly available in microbial production chassis.

Another topic allied to more fundamental application is the use of System Biology tools (Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics) to streamline designed metabolic networks in microbial production systems. This collection aims to encompass all method and application developments allied to metabolic engineering of microbial production systems for energy carriers, chemical and pharmaceutical compounds.
To facilitate scale up of bioprocesses, the Topic evolves around new aspects in bioprocess engineering including the use of in-silico simulations to accelerate and validate scale-up configuration.

To emphasize the importance of downstream product processing and value addition one topic is open to new research results to purify bio-products from complex matrices such as spend fermentation media. Particular new innovation involving new separation matrices (i.e. magnetic bead separation) and their integration in the overall process flow are of interest.

We aim to highlight the impact of synthetic biology on bioprocess development and will focus on aspects such as new microbial chassis development, the use of unconventional or non-natural nucleotide and amino acids that aid in development of designed cell components, regulatory switches or reporting systems. We strongly encourage reviews and original research that highlight the impact of bio-informatic and molecular simulation tools for in-silico predicting, i.e. enzyme function or metabolic network interaction to accelerate experimental development.

(Please note that abstract submission is optional)

Keywords: industrial bioprocess engineering, bioeconomy, synthetic biology, biocatalysis, bioinformatics, bioseperation science, microbial biotechnology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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