Metabolic engineering and system biology

The amino acid production industry will remain as a fast growing business enterprise until a cheaper and energy efficient process is commercialized. Microbial amino acid production will be exploited to the most possible extend of maximal production capacity and process economics by new innovations in strain improvement, metabolic engineering, and systems biology. Microbial amino acid production holds a promising position in the future of white biotechnology and studies on utilization of feedstock for... 

Fig. 1 The integration of systems biology tools with metabolic engineering for advancing industrial biotechnology is herein referred to as industrial systems biology. Industrial systems biology offers the opportunity to introduce new concepts in metabolic engineering and advances the development of cell factories through traditional fermentation for production of natural products and, after the advent of recombinant DNA technology, for the production of recombinant metabolites [1]...

In the future, metabolic engineering and biotechnological approaches can be used as an alternative production system to overcome the limited availability of biologically active, commercially valuable and medicinally important secondary metabolite compounds. Advancement in culture techniques may provide new means for the culturing of non-cultured/exotic lichens and production of then-secondary compounds as they produce in nature. This may create an ultimate advantage to provide a continuous, rehable source of natural products from this complex organism. 

Biosynthetic production of thymidine is overall a complex process combining the controlled introduction of a novel biotransformation step into a biological system with selective enhancement or knock-out of a series of existing metabolic steps. Metabolic engineering to enhance cofactor recycling at both ribonucleotide reduction and dUMP methylation steps has important parallels in other systems, as whole-cell biotransformations are frequently employed as a means to supply, in situ, high-cost and usually labile cofactors. 

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