Microbial methanotrophy: Methane capture to biomanufacturing of platform chemicals and fuels

Abstract

Methanotrophs with other methane-assimilating microbes, are of prime importance due to their role in methane fixation, which helps to mitigate elevated atmospheric methane concentrations. With soaring demands of energy sector, major and foremost product of methane oxidation is biomethanol used as a biofuel which is catalyzed by the methane monooxgenases. Inherent methane oxidation capacity assists to palliate environmental distress, dependency on conventional non-renewable resources for chemical production processes. Sustainable future demands the energy rich molecules to be synthesised with least carbon emission. Many technologies have been developed and explored for methane-oxidizing systems, which looks to be lucrative towards establishing as biorefinery for manufacturing various chemicals ranging from energy rich molecules, fine chemicals, novel compounds, and nutraceuticals. Methane monooxygenases, the catalytic apparatus for methane oxidation, have added insights into comprehensive understanding; underpinning methanotrophs as valuable platform for biomanufacturing via mitigating methane footprint into drop-in fuels and high value biomolecules. The availability of modern molecular technologies based on synthetic biology and modern omics studies demonstrated methanotrophs can be efficient manufacturing platforms for producing novel products and tailoring at molecular level achieved better titre. Realizing the importance of the methane-based economy, this review focusses on summarizing basics of the methanotrophic systems, their catalytic machinery for methane capture via methane monooxygenase system etc. Further, this review includes the recent advancements while emphasizing on the foremost biofuel entity, i.e. methanol, production by methanotrophs. Later part is focused on their application as biocatalysts and biorefineries to produce various valuable molecules such as drop-in-fuels and platform chemicals.