Metabolic Engineering of Escherichia coli

Metabolic engineering has become an essential technology for developing microbial cell factories for producing chemicals and materials from sustainable and renewable feedstocks. Equipped with the ever-advancing tools and strategies of modern systems biology and synthetic biology, traditional metabolic engineering has been upgraded to a next and systems level, which enables more rapid and sophisticated engineering of microbes for producing desired bioproducts. Escherichia coli has been playing a key role as a workhorse in the production of various chemicals and materials and also as a model bacterium in the development of advanced engineering tools and strategies. In this chapter, we review the achievements in metabolic engineering of E. coli for the biobased production of chemicals and materials together with accompanying tools and strategies.