Advances in Polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) Production, Volume 2.

During the two years that have passed since the first volume of "Advances in Polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) production" was published, the progress in PHA-related research was indeed tremendous, calling for the next, highly bioprocess- and bioengineering-oriented volume. This editorial paper summarizes and puts into context the contributions to this second volume of the Bioengineering Special Issue; it covers highly topical fields of PHA-related R&D activities, covering, beside the pronounced bioengineering-related articles, the fields of the microbiology of underexplored, but probably emerging, PHA production strains from the groups of Pseudomonas, cyanobacteria, methanotrophs, and from the extremophilic domain of haloarchaea. Moreover, novel second-generation lignocellulose feedstocks for PHA production from agriculture to be used in biorefinery concepts, new approaches for fine-tuning the composition of PHA co- and terpolyesters, process simulation for PHA production from methane-rich natural gas, the challenges associated with rheology-governed oxygen transfer in high cell density cultivations, rapid spectroscopic in-line analytics for process monitoring, and the biomedical application of PHA biopolyesters after appropriate advanced processing are the subjects of the presented studies.