Advances in metabolic engineering of yeasts

This need is addressed by the concept of metabolic engineering, which can be defined as the application of genetic techniques for the manipulation of metabolic pathways to bring about desirable changes in the activities of an organism. This chapter provides a discussion of metabolic engineering and the tools that are used to apply it 

Brewing Mkr biol . hltp // ta.doi.oig/10.101( 978-l-7S242-3M.7.00004-6 Copyright O 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved 

Developments are described in modem brewing practice, and how these are providing the impetus for developing new brewing yeast strains. 

Metabolic engineering seeks to close the gap in understanding between a basic knowledge of biochemical pathways and the overarching mechanisms that regulate cellular functions. Information such as the sequences of chemical steps that make up biochemical pathways, the enzymes that catalyse the individual steps and the genes responsible for their synthesis are essential, but provide relatively little information 

The metabolome describes the concentrations of the entire complanent of small molecules present in the cell at any given time (Zamboni Sauer, 2009). Advances in the power of analytical techniques, as discussed in the next section, now allow this detailed scratiny to be made such that it is possible to monitor the whole of the metabolome. The compounds involved are direct participants in metabolic pathways, and they can also function as modulators of enzyme activity. They can be used to infer the presence of heretofore unknown pathways, and they provide information as to how nutrients become distributed throughout the cell and how and where excreted products arise. 

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