Advances in Microbial Cell Factories

Dear Colleagues,

In the “cell factory” concept, microorganisms convert substrates into desirable products. Well-established fermentation products include beer, antibiotics and insulin. Recent developments enabled by native and engineered microbial cell factories include oleochemicals, biopolymers, biofuels, animal feed, biopesticides, nutraceuticals and flavors. Currently, the availability of standardized and newly developed cloning and expression vectors, the accessibility and affordability of de novo DNA synthesis, the advancement in bioinformatics tools and the expansion of biological databases have allowed cells to become more programmable. In this revolutionized era, bioprocess design and modeling, AI-guided automation and high-throughput process monitoring greatly reduce the bioprocess development time and costs. Despite all this progress, only few biotechnological processes are adopted at an industrial level outside the confines of laboratory settings. Challenges and bottlenecks still need to be addressed at several levels including feedstock flexibility, bioreactor design, metabolic burdens and downstream processing and iterative scale-up.

This Special Issue of Microorganisms provides a platform for authors to present novel tools and scientific concepts on Microbial Cell Factories by means of research articles, reviews and editorials. We invite you to send contributions relating to the development of microbial production platforms—of eukaryotic and prokaryotic origin.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Brück
Dr. Dania Awad
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Microorganisms is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.