The current state of industrial biotechnology means that the vast majority biorefineries relies on edible substrates such as corn, wheat or sugar canes. This has sparked sparked the food vs. fuel debate, leading to the fundamental question: “Should we use our edible crops to feed the growing human population, or use it to provide sustainable chemicals to the industrialised world?”. A better question might be: “Why are we not doing both?”. The limiting factor of current processes, is a lack of molecular tools that has limited us to rely on a small number of organisms with narrow substrate ranges. Even though efforts has been made to expand the substrate range of many conventional cell factories, such as Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the task has proven difficult and real impact has soon to come as a result of these experiments.
