Improving butanol fermentation to enter the advanced biofuel market

1-Butanol is a large-volume, intermediate chemical with favorable physical and chemical properties for blending with or directly substituting for gasoline. The per-volume value of butanol, as a chemical, is sufficient for investing into the recommercialization of the classical acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) (E. M. Green, Curr. Opin. Biotechnol. 22:337-343, 2011) fermentation process. Furthermore, with modest improvements in three areas of the ABE process, operating costs can be sufficiently decreased to make butanol an economically viable advanced biofuel. The three areas of greatest interest are (i) maximizing yields of butanol on any particular substrate, (ii) expanding substrate utilization capabilities of the host microorganism, and (iii) reducing the energy consumption of the overall production process, in particular the separation and purification operations. In their study in the September/October 2012 issue of mBio, Jang et al. [mBio 3(5):e00314-12, 2012] describe a comprehensive study on driving glucose metabolism in Clostridium acetobutylicum to the production of butanol. Moreover, they execute a metabolic engineering strategy to achieve the highest yet reported yields of butanol on glucose.