Co-production of microbial polyhydroxyalkanoates with other chemicals

Engineering microorganisms capable of simultaneously accumulating multiple products are economically attractive for biotechnology. Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) or microbial bioplastics are promising as biodegradable plastics to address environmental concerns resulted from plastic wastes accumulation. Unfortunately, PHA production is still limited and cannot compete with the chemically synthesized plastics due to their high production cost. Efforts have been devoted to reduce PHA production cost by employing PHA co-production with other valuable chemicals. Successful co-productions of PHA have been demonstrated with amino acids, proteins, alcohols, hydrogen, biosurfactants, exopolysaccharides and several fine chemicals. The strategy allows recovering PHA from the cells and other value-added products from the no-cells broths. Numerous successful strategies have been developed for minimizing the substrate cost and improving the product yields. This paper reviews the recent strategies developed in PHA co-production with other compounds, discusses the challenges and prospective during the scale up of the co-production strategies.