Challenges Ahead Before Biobased Ester Production can Move to the Industrial Level

Abstract

There are some major challenges ahead before biobased ester production can move to the industrial level. The key ester producing enzyme AAT is not understood well, and studies that focus on fundamental aspects of its function are scarce. For example, it is still not clear why many AATs display thioesterase and esterase activities, and how to control these activities. In case of Eat1, ethanol is the determining factor that shifts the enzyme from a hydrolase to an AAT (Kruis et al., 2017). The controlling factors in other AATs have not been established yet.