Heurstic search for metabolic engineering: de novo synthesis of vanillin

We present the application of heuristic search to in silico metabolic pathway engineering. In particular, we discuss a new computational approach to elucidate complex pathways and to address the practical challenge of combinatorial complexity in pathway inference. We have implemented this approach in a new computational framework, called PathMiner, which is useful for designing metabolic engineering strategies. In this paper, we describe our approach to analyze pathways for the de novo synthesis of vanillin, as well as a transgenic strategy t s a o ©