Industrial biotechnology has been identified as a key technology to mitigate today's major social, economic, and environmental issues for the sustainable production of enzymes, pharmaceuticals, basic chemicals, fuels, and foods that lay the foundation for a circular and bio-based economy. While industrial biotechnology was initially limited primarily to the use of natural microorganisms and their enzymes for the synthesis of bioproducts (e.g., wine, beer, and penicillin), the development of recombinant DNA technology allowed the microbial cell to be transformed into an enhanced cell factory for the synthesis of bioproducts that it does not naturally produce. At this stage, these were mainly simpler products such as the human peptide insulin or industrial enzymes such as chymosin and lipases. Today, the application of new technologies such as synthetic biology and metabolic engineering has greatly accelerated the process of building libraries of potential microbial cell factories and the associated bioprocess.

Despite numerous success stories of industrial cell factory-based bioprocesses, most of which utilize a limited number of traditional microorganisms (e.g., Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae) operating at moderate process conditions (e.g., growing at 30-37°C and pH 7), many other attempts for microbial production of basic chemicals often fail at the scale-up stage as they are not economically feasible. The main bottleneck here is the incompatibility of the currently used cell factories and the industrial process conditions such as high temperatures and acidic environments. This is especially problematic in the development of bioprocesses for microbial production of chemicals from second generation biomass feedstocks as a sustainable alternative to current petrochemical processes because of the required pretreatment of biomass feedstocks at high-temperature and low-pH and high purification costs. Here we propose to develop a thermoacidophilic industrial host that allows full-cell bioconversion at high-temperature and low-pH in a novel and unique consolidated bioprocess with lignocellulosic fermentation for the synthesis of 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP) as an example.