Industrial Biotechnology is firmly established in several industries such as food and feed, and is a central pillar of the knowledge-based bioeconomy. Industrial biotechnology is currently evolving driven by a change towards sustainable chemical production and by technological advances as evident in omics, systems biology or synthetic biology approaches.

Microbial production strains are developed and optimized rationally to enable access to alternative substrates and to novel products. This involves not only recombining DNA but also recombining the interplay of the encoded enzymes. Synthetic pathways can be composed of enzymes originating from different (micro)organisms in Nature. Metabolic networks can be engineered by combining and rewiring metabolic pathways of different origin in a single production strain. As a resource genes of characterized enzymes and pathways can be used, but increasingly also DNA sequences obtained by metagenomic approaches find application.

In Biocatalysis isolated enzymes are typically used to generate high-value products. The cascading of several reactions holds the potential not only to integrate cofactor regeneration but also to implement more complex reaction sequences in a one-pot-format.