acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation

traitmech:000180 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A fermentation in which solventogenic bacteria convert organic carbon sources to organic acids and then reassimilate those acids to produce acetone, butanol, and ethanol solvents.

Trait evidence (2)

DOI:10.1073/pnas.1423143112
One canonical example of such processes is acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation by Clostridium acetobutylicum, during which cells convert carbon sources to organic acids that are later reassimilated to produce solvents as a strategy for cellular survival.

Liao et al. use the exact acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation name and describe the acidogenic-to-solventogenic conversion of carbon sources into solvent end products.
DOI:10.1002/bit.22003
Biological production of butanol (with acetone and ethanol) was one of the largest industrial fermentation processes early in the 20th century.

Lee et al. independently review fermentative butanol production with acetone and ethanol by Clostridia.

Provenance

Identifier source: TraitMech local identifier
Definition source: DOI:10.1073/pnas.1423143112

Parent traits (1)

Fermentation METPO:1002005

Synonyms (2)

ABE fermentation EXACT_SYNONYM · DOI:10.1073/pnas.1423143112
acetone-butanol fermentation RELATED_SYNONYM · DOI:10.1128/mr.50.4.484-524.1986

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC 824 NCBITaxon:272562 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1423143112 Wild-type ATCC 824 strain whose ABE fermentations were experimentally reproduced by Liao et al.'s integrated model.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve an exact external ontology class for acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation before adding a TraitRecord xref.

CURATION TODO OPEN acetone-butanol-ethanol-fermentation-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-14

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

No exact GO or external metabolism class was resolved for the organism-level ABE fermentation phenotype; broader fermentation classes and individual solvent-production reactions are shifted relative to this product-specific fermentation class.

Curation history

2026-09-14T02:40:39Z · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex
Minted acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation as a DOI-backed solventogenic fermentation TraitRecord after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; METPO has no exact acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation class yet and the placeholder is reserved in proposals/metpo_traitmech_v57.