Metabolic Engineering Production of Raw Materials

A very active area of research in both academia and indnstry is the nse of genetic engineering to modify the existing metabolic pathways (or designing new ones) in plants and microbes to optimize the prodnction of certain chemicals. Metabolic 

FIGURE 15.6 PPC synthesis using propylene and CO2 in the presence of an appropriate catalyst. 

Commercial polymers generated totally or partially from renewable resources will remain a very small component in the production of plastics, rubbers, and fibers, in the near future. However, their importance and marketability will continue to grow. They provide environmental and potentially economic advantages over their counterpart generated entirely from fossil raw materials. In addition, they offer more readily desirable properties such as biodegradability and biocompatibility that are more difficult to achieve with synthetic polymers. With extensive ongoing research and development pertaining to new catalysts that will enable the incorporation/ modification of renewable monomers into feedstocks as well as the development of new metabolic microbial pathways for the bio-production of monomers, the field will continue to advance to achieve production costs of polymers from renewable resources that are reasonably competitive. 

---