Advances in Biochemical Conversion Technologies of Waste to Bioenergy, Biochemicals, and Biomaterials: 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Global concern about fossil fuel depletion and its harmful effects on the environment is ever more prominent and has led to a focus on searching for alternative sources for sustainable fuel, chemical, and material production. There has been an increasing trend of adopting various biochemical conversion technologies, such as anaerobic digestion, composting, fermentation, and microbial electrochemical technologies, to simultaneously extract resources from waste while also addressing its treatment specifications. The conversion of waste materials into valuable end products is the most effective circular economy activity. Bioeconomy activities based on biochemical transformations and bioprocesses have become crucial in the fight against climate change. Residual solid waste such as forest residues, agro-industrial waste, organic fraction of municipal solid waste, and animal manure are recognized as sustainable feedstocks—during some pretreatments, its biodegradability can be enhanced and subsequently becomes accessible for microorganisms to convert it into a plethora of value-added products. For example, industrial waste gas pollutants such as CO and CO₂ can be bioconverted to biofuels such as ethanol, butanol, and hexanol using acetogens. On the other hand, using microbial electrochemical technologies, electroactive bacteria can oxidize organic matter present in wastewater, converting it into electrons and protons at the anode to generate electricity or hydrogen on the cathode side. A more recent approach, termed “microbial electro-synthesis”, allows the reduction of CO₂ by converting this greenhouse gas to multi-carbon compounds at the cathode.

This second volume of the Special Issue “Advances in Biochemical Conversion Technologies of Waste to Bioenergy, Biochemicals, and Biomaterials”, will now be published in the journal Bioengineering. The aim of this Special Issue is to highlight the fundamental discoveries, recent developments, and innovative research in bioprocess technologies for resource recovery from solid, liquid, and gaseous waste.

We would like to invite authors to submit original and state-of-the-art critical reviews within the theme of the Special Issue, including, but are not limited to, the following:

Theme 1: anaerobic digestion technology; biogas upgrading; biohydrogen production technology; pretreatment methods; bio-hythane;
Theme 2: syngas fermentation: acetogens; hydrogenotrophic methanogens; carbon monoxide/carbon dioxide bioconversion; biological water gas shift reaction;
Theme 3: microbial electrochemical technologies: exoelectrogens; electrotrophs; microbial fuel cell (MFC); microbial electrolysis cell (MEC); microbial electrosynthesis (MES); biosensors;
Theme 4: bioproducts: biofuel (ethanol, butanol, hexanol, biogas, and biohydrogen); biochemicals; bioelectricity; biopolymers; microbial proteins;
Theme 5: innovative bioreactor design; modelling; genetic and metabolic engineering; techno-economic analysis, machine learning for biochemical systems.

Dr. Haris Nalakath Abubackar
Dr. Catarina M. Paquete
Dr. Luciana Peixoto
Dr. Tugba Keskin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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