Abstract:In the past few centuries, fermentation engineering has experienced the conversion from natural fermentation into metabolic engineering. The fermentation products were also shifted from food and other means of life to more basic industrial materials. Has made great progress in strain selection, process control, separation technology, etc. In the past three decades, the rapid development of biotechnology has provided an important foundation for the development of fermentation engineering in the new era, enabling scientists and engineers to achieve more goals through fermentation engineering, and supporting other industries, such as pharmaceutical industry, food industry, agriculture and animal husbandry, energy and materials, textile, paper and leather industry, daily chemical industry, environment and ecology. In the 21st century, the contradiction between human sustainable development and ecological environment, resources and energy is increasingly prominent. How to play the key role of fermentation engineering is also a major task of fermentation engineering researchers. The developments of systems biology, synthetic biology, bioinformatics, advanced materials science and so on have also significantly revolutionized fermentation engineering. The utilization of advanced biotechnology can achieve a series of unprecedented changes, such as the transformation of aerobic fermentation to anaerobic fermentation, the artificial synthesis of microbial community of fermented food, the construction of autotrophic microbial fermentation plant, artificial synthetase, etc., so that more difficult challenges in the future could be successfully accomplished by fermentation engineering.
