Synthetic biology devices as tools for metabolic engineering

Recent applications of synthetic biology tools for yeast metabolic engineering.

The last 20 years of metabolic engineering has enabled bio-based production of fuels and chemicals from renewable carbon sources using cost-effective bioprocesses. Much of this work has been accomplished using engineered microorganisms that act as chemical factories. Although the time required to engineer microbial chemical factories has steadily decreased, improvement is still needed. Through ...

Systems Biology as an Integrated Platform for Bioinformatics, Systems Synthetic Biology, and Systems Metabolic Engineering

Systems biology aims at achieving a system-level understanding of living organisms and applying this knowledge to various fields such as synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and medicine. System-level understanding of living organisms can be derived from insight into: (i) system structure and the mechanism of biological networks such as gene regulation, protein interactions, signaling, and...

Metabolic Burden: Cornerstones in Synthetic Biology and Metabolic Engineering Applications.

Engineering cell metabolism for bioproduction not only consumes building blocks and energy molecules (e.g., ATP) but also triggers energetic inefficiency inside the cell. The metabolic burdens on microbial workhorses lead to undesirable physiological changes, placing hidden constraints on host productivity. We discuss cell physiological responses to metabolic burdens, as well as strategies to i...

Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering approaches to produce biofuels.

Accessing Nature's diversity through metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.

In this perspective, we highlight recent examples and trends in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology that demonstrate the synthetic potential of enzyme and pathway engineering for natural product discovery. In doing so, we introduce natural paradigms of secondary metabolism whereby simple carbon substrates are combined into complex molecules through "scaffold diversification", and subseq...