As "the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil", biotechnological production of fuels, chemicals, and materials is becoming an emerging field that attracts great interest worldwide. Owing to the rapid development of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, many high-value fine chemicals, as well as a few low-value bulk chemicals, have been successfully produced by engineered cell factories and scaled-up to industrial scales. Theoretically, most chemicals can be produced by microorganisms. However, developing microbial cell factories that are of commercial value may take many years of effort, during which many hurdles have to be overcome to make the innovation a success.
 
In this themed Special Issue, the readers will see a collection of articles that describe the commercial success of engineered cell factories. Engineering principles and progresses on how to design, select, construct, screen, and optimize microbial cell factories are presented, together with the perspectives on future challenges.

Edited by Yin Li, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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Microbial Cell Factories is an open access peer-reviewed journal that covers any topic related to the development, use and investigation of microbial cells as producers of recombinant proteins and natural products, or as catalyzers of biological transformations of industrial interest. Microbial Cell Factories is the world leading, primary research journal fully focusing on Applied Microbiology.

The journal is divided into the following editorial sections:

Metabolic engineering
Synthetic biology
Whole-cell biocatalysis
Microbial regulations
Recombinant protein production/bioprocessing
Production of natural compounds
Systems biology of cell factories
Microbial production processes