Recent Advances in Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Biocatalysts (enzymes) are proteins possessing catalytic functions capable of high enantioselective and high yield under mild reaction conditions. The wide applications of enzymes can be found in the fields of pharmaceutics, food, cosmetics, detergents, and biofuel. The subjects concerning enzyme production cover strain screening, recombinant strain construction, fermentation, enzyme separation and purification, enzyme extraction, biotransformation, enzyme immobilization, and enzyme bioreactors. Enzyme process development also includes enzyme kinetic analysis, enzyme process design, and optimization.

In addition to enzyme production and process development, this Special Issue also aims to include recent progress in the subjects concerning synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. Synthetic biology is a multidisciplinary research filed aiming to redesign and fabricate novel biological products, components, and systems that do not exist in nature for practical applications. Synthetic biologists usually exploit top–down and bottom–up approaches, the former of which involves genetic engineering to introduce novel function in the living cells, and the latter of which assembles the various biological components to construct an artificial biosystem. In the past two decades, with the abundance of genetic information and the availability of chemically synthetic DNA, researchers and industries have created organisms with modified genomes for the production of biofuels, renewable chemicals, secondary metabolites, and pharmaceutical intermediates. This rapidly-growing topic is of tremendous economic potential and has drawn the worldwide attention of the biotech industry. On the other hand, metabolic engineering is one of the promising fields that have been applied in biofuels, biomaterials, and CO₂ fixation. Metabolic engineering involves DNA techniques, enzyme catalysis, cellular regulation and cellular energy balance. Metabolic engineering regarding other different applications are also involved. Therefore, both original research and review articles covering the subject of advanced biocatalyst process, synthetic biology, and metabolic engineering are welcome for inclusion in the Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Yung-Chuan Liu
Prof. Dr. Si-Yu Li
Assist. Prof. Dr. Nien-Jen Hu
Guest Editors

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