Lactic Acid Bacteria for Production of Platform Chemicals: A Dark Horse in the Field of Industrial Biotechnology

Climate change, environmental security, and sustainability of petrochemical resources along with depletion of fossil fuels are the current immerging issues all over the world. The industrial production of commodity chemicals from agricultural biomass provides a noteworthy contribution to solving the above mentioned environmental problems. The use of nonrenewable energy or petrochemical resources for the bulk chemical production can be completely saved with use of present-day state-of-the-art industrial microbiology and biotechnology. The industrial microbiologists are always in search of a robust organism which can utilize cheap, renewable agro-wastes and sustain several stresses for the production of commodity chemicals. Almost all of these important and necessary characteristics are available in lactic acid bacteria (LAB), which makes them a dark horse in the field of industrial biotechnology. Till date, due to widespread industrial practice and immense economic value, LAB have been extensively studied, and ample data on their physiology, metabolism and genetics has been generated over the years. This information is fully implemented in different successful application and completely exploited in food industry. However, during the last few decades, exponential advancement in technology created the platform for LAB to be explored for industrial applications beyond its regular use in food industry. Here in this book chapter, we discussed about the importance of platform chemical, viz. lactic acid, different substrates for lactic acid fermentation and their limitation. We also discussed the metabolic engineering studies with LAB and recent strategies to expand their cellular traits for the biobased production of commodity chemicals.