The bright frontiers of microbial metabolic optogenetics. Author Scott Wegner, Rachel Barocio-Galindo, José Avalos Publication Year 2022 Type Journal Article Abstract In recent years, light-responsive systems from the field of optogenetics have been applied to several areas of metabolic engineering with remarkable success. By taking advantage of light's high tunability, reversibility, and orthogonality to host endogenous processes, optogenetic systems have enabled unprecedented dynamical controls of microbial fermentations for chemical production, metabolic flux analysis, and population compositions in co-cultures. In this article, we share our opinions on the current state of this new field of metabolic optogenetics.We make the case that it will continue to impact metabolic engineering in increasingly new directions, with the potential to challenge existing paradigms for metabolic pathway and strain optimization as well as bioreactor operation. Keywords Fermentation, Optogenetics, Metabolic Networks and Pathways, Metabolic Engineering Journal Curr Opin Chem Biol Volume 71 Pages 102207 Date Published 2022 Dec ISSN Number 1879-0402 DOI 10.1016/j.cbpa.2022.102207 Alternate Journal Curr Opin Chem Biol PMID 36103753 PubMedGoogle ScholarBibTeXEndNote X3 XML