As important liquid fuel and chemical raw materials, 2,3-butanediol and its derivatives have broad industrial application prospects. Economical and efficient 2,3-butanediol microbial production has significant impetus to the low-carbon and circular economy development of China. Focusing on the latest achievements in the microbial production of 2,3-butanediol, this review summarizes the hot spots of the researchers’ attentions nowadays, which can be divided into four parts: identification of the key genes and enzymes involved in the 2,3-butanediol metabolic pathway, development of new strains and metabolic engineered strains for high yield or chiral 2,3-butanediol production, strategies for fermentation optimization such as simultaneous saccharification and fermentation, and technology improvement for combining process involved in 2,3-butanediol recovering processing. These achievements in the last three years are classified and discussed with state-of-art views. At last, guidelines for future studies are also proposed. It is pointed out that future research should focus on new strains, new genes and enzymes, new metabolic pathways, new cheap and renewable resources for substrate, and new technology for fermentation and separation. There’s no doubt that metabolic engineered class Ⅰ strains, which can utilize cost-effective and renewable substrates to lower the raw materials cost producing chiral 2,3-butanediol with high yield and productivity, should be favored. Besides, new technology in separation and purification process must be developed and improved to lower the cost of downstream processing. Contents
1 Introduction
2 Identification of the key genes and enzymes involved in the metabolic pathway of 2,3-butanediol
2.1 Metabolic pathway analysis
2.2 Identification of the key genes and enzymes
3 Strains and their improvements
3.1 Major microorganisms producing 2,3-butanediol
3.2 Metabolic engineering of the microorganisms for high yield and productivity
3.3 Construction of the metabolic engineered microorganisms for single isomer production
4 Strategy of optimization for fermentation
4.1 Parameter optimization of culture environment
4.2 Economic fermentation substrates
4.3 Simultaneous saccharification and fermentation
4.4 Co-culture
5 Optimization of separation and purification process
6 Conclusion and outlook