Sustainable technologies for platform and drop-in chemicals: production and applications

Abstract Tremendous efforts are put forth for the development of biological processes for fuels, chemicals, and other intermediates, replacing the classical or traditional fossil-based processes. For several years, ethanol is the major product of renewable substrates, but the process is not economical as it requires pretreatment of substrates. Lignocellulosic biomass (LCB), the most abundant renewable substrate, is recalcitrant and series of treatments like acid/alkali pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis are required for the release of fermentable sugars, no natural microorganisms can utilize the native biomass and produce value-added products. Therefore various strategies with the screening of new microbes, strain engineering, and process optimization are promising to construct microorganisms with all the necessary functions and highly resistant to the inhibitors. Another approach to increasing the credibility and economic viability of the process is the conversion of LCB to high value-added products like organic acids and diols. In this chapter, we compare the processes developed for various organic acids and diols (drop-in chemicals) using LCB, and later we provided the applications of various platform and drop-in chemicals in the polymer and chemical industry.