This has been a tactic used for over 30 years now, but of course it's gotten a lot more sophisticated as of late. Getting bacteria to do your dirty work is gre

This has been a tactic used for over 30 years now, but of course it's gotten a lot more sophisticated as of late. Getting bacteria to do your dirty work is great for some stuff, necessary for others, but is definitely not going to be the dominant method of chemical production. A few factors: 1. Bacteria are typically pretty slow relative to industrial chemical processes and their speed can vary immensely depending on a lot of variables. This is by far the largest reason why more people don't use bacteria to produce chemicals. 2. Bacteria take a lot of metabolic genetic engineering to do what you want them to do reliably, and can lose traits they are engineered for relatively easily due to natural selection against energetically inefficient (read: productive in this capacity) mutants. 3. Any chemicals derived from bacteria still need to be isolated, combined, and purified in an industrial fashion before they are actually useful. 4. Valuable chemicals which are extremely expensive to produce with traditional industrial methods (in particular, certain chiral molecules) can probably be produced more cheaply with a properly engineered bacteria. As you can see, there are a lot of drawbacks, but #4 can be a colossal economic advantage for certain chemicals. In particular, recent FDA regulations have mandated uniformity amongst drug-grade chemicals, meaning that they must be purified in order to only contain one isomeric form rather than a mix. This is important because the different isomers of the same chemical may have different biological effects. Isolating stereoisomers from each other is traditionally extremely expensive and slow, but a bacteria that could reliably produce the desired isomer would avoid this pitfall.