On the future fermentation

Future fermentations will be open, continuous and automatically controlled with fresh water and energy saving. The production strains will be extremophiles engineered by synthetic biology. Summary Microbial fermentations produce chemicals, materials, biofuels, foods and medicines for many years. The processes are less competitive compared to chemical industries. To increase its competitiveness, technologies must be developed to address the following issues including fresh water shortage, heavy energy consumption, microbial contaminations, complexity of sterile operations, poor oxygen utilization in the cultures, food‐related ingredients as substrates, low substrate to product conversion efficiency, difficult cells and broth separation, large amount of wastewater, discontinuous processes, heavy labour involvements and expensive bioreactors. Future industrial fermentations should be more effective with the above issues reasonably addressed. Recently, extremophilic bacteria have well addressed the above issues for future fermentation.