Cell-Free Systems for Sustainable Production of Biofuels

Cell-free system is an easy, rapid, sensitive platform for production of various chemicals and biofuels. The system lacks membrane-bound barriers, but it possesses all of the necessary substrates, biomolecules, and machinery that are needed for the production of desired products. In addition, cell-free system offers an alternative to existing in vivo production systems. Biological experiments can be easily created with cell-free systems under a variety of reaction conditions, which makes it a powerful tool, but cell-free system has its own limitations such as narrow reaction time and deficiency of exchange of materials and energy from cell surroundings. The system is being used for the production of various important biofuels such as ethanol, butanol, hydrogen, isoprene, bisabolene, limonene, pinene and farnesene. In this chapter, we discuss recent progress and uses of cell-free system for production of biofuels toward industrial applications.