Environmentally Benign Bioprocesses for Energy and Chemicals Production

0 Q. Yang Department of Bioscience and Bioengineering, Dalian University of Technology , Dalian 116024, China - Just prior to Beijing 2008 Olympic game, the 12th Asia-Pacific Confederation of Chemical Engineering Congress (APCChE 2008) was successfully held on Aug. 46, 2008 in Chinas beautiful coast cityDalian. This is the first time to open the regular conference in the mainland of China for APCChE, and nearly 1,000 participants from over 30 countries or regions attended this exciting event. Under the theme of the Chemical Engineering in Sustainable Development, six frontier fields of chemical engineering and biochemical engineering were substantially discussed during APCChE 2008, including Clean Energy Technology, Environment and Green Processing, Materials Science and Engineering, Biotechnology, New Frontiers in Chemical Engineering, and Education for Chemical Engineers. The biotechnology topic was the most concerned subject among more than 1,800 submissions to APCChE 2008. Only in Biotechnology session, 75 orals and160 posters were presented, in which two excellent paper prizes, two technical innovation prizes, and four excellent poster prizes were awarded. It was the organizers honor to have gotten the opportunity to edit a special issue of Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology (ABAB) for the biotechnology and other related fields of APCChE 2008, with a special focus on the theme of Environmentally Benign Bioprocesses for Energy and Chemicals Production. The theme represents the active response from biochemical engineers to the ever increasing challenges of global problems related to energy, resource, and environment. Totally 34 papers were submitted to the special issue, with one withdrawn by author, 13 rejected, and 20 accepted after peer review via the Springer editorial management system. We would like to thank Dr. Ashok Mulchandani, the editor-in-chief of ABAB, for his kind permission and careful guidance of us to edit this special issue. We thank all the contributors for submitting their abstracts to this conference and the full papers to ABAB for consideration of publication. Our special thanks go to all the reviewers of the special (...truncated)