Microbial biochemicals exhibit various excellent biological activities and the function of accurate regulation, demonstrating enormous potential and advantage in the fields of food, drug, and enzyme production (Ge et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2021). For instance, antibiotics produced by fungus saved a great number of the wounded in the war. Microbial protein has been gradually developed in food and enzyme yield recently and is expected to reach 126 million USD by 2028 (De Brabander et al., 2023). Moreover, the treatment of cancer and other incurable disease may be broken through by microbial biochemicals (Xv et al., 2018). However, with the increasing demand for microbial biochemicals, the low yield, long cycle, and high cost in the industrialized production process are long-term challenges.

Numerous regulation methods were attempted to address the three questions mentioned above. Recent advances in molecular biology, most notably the development of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology (Doudna and Charpentier, 2014), have revolutionized the yield of microorganism production. However, concerns about the safety, stability, and acceptability of modified microorganisms hamper the progress of industrial application of molecular biology, and customers prefer natural microbial biochemicals (Strobbe et al., 2023). Meanwhile, the supply of precursor substances (Hu et al., 2023) or chemical regulators (Zhang et al., 2022), was also the solution to low yield of biochemicals. In addition, the immobilized culture and continuous fermentation devices successfully reduced the fermentation period, despite the associated high costs (Gedam et al., 2019b). Whereas, how to maintain the fermentation performance of immobilized cells is still a challenge. Furthermore, according to current low-carbon and eco-friendly regulations, efficient utilization of raw materials rather than commercial medium is a key cost-effective strategy of bio-manufacture (Ai et al., 2022; Sindhu et al., 2018). Nonetheless, raw materials consist of toxic and hard-degraded substances, hampering the growth of microorganisms. In general, alternative technologies should be developed to cover the disadvantages of the regulation mentioned above methods and promote the efficient production of target metabolites.

Surfactants have been widely applied in various areas, including mineral extraction (Pal et al., 2017), drug delivery (Ge et al., 2019), and stability of emulsions (Hu et al., 2015), due to their solubilization and embedment properties. Moreover, the low cost, convenient utilization, and high efficiency of surfactants make their commercial production more feasible. The market for surfactants will increase from $41.22 billion in 2021 to $57.81 billion by 2028 (Datta et al., 2024). Recently, growing evidence proved that surfactant-mediated bio-manufacture could stimulate target metabolites production (Tu et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2020a; Yang et al., 2021b), thus it is urgent to summarize the latest research advances on surfactant-mediated bio-manufacture to guide surfactants selection and evaluate their application feasibility. However, previous studies have predominantly examined surfactant-mediated bio-manufacturing from individual perspectives including the extractive fermentation of lactic acid (Othman et al., 2017), extractive fermentation in cloud point system (Wang and Dai, 2010), and surfactant-promoted hydrolysis of substrates for target metabolites production (Zheng et al., 2021). This knowledge gap has obscured the standardized methods and application principles of surfactant-mediated bio-manufacturing, thereby impeding further exploration of microbial biochemical production facilitated by surfactants. Hence, this review systematically illustrated the properties of surfactants, the application of surfactants in biochemicals production, and the mechanism of surfactants prompting the target metabolites production. Moreover, based on the current studies, the perspectives of surfactant-mediated bio-manufacture were proposed. This review was hopefully to expand the development of surfactants application and facilitate microbial biochemical production in the future.