Metabolic Engineering in the Post Genomic Era

Book excerpt: The Horizon Scientific Press titles focus on high-level microbiology and molecular biology topics. Written by internationally renowned and highly respected leaders in the field, titles in this series comprise of review manuals, practical manuals, and reference texts for research scientists, bioscience professionals and graduate students. Engineering living cells continues to pose immense challenges to the researcher. In fact many bioengineers have only just started to appreciate the full extent of the hierarchical control used by living systems: upon attempts to increase the activity of a "rate-limiting" step, the multiple feedbacks at the metabolic, signaling and genetic levels result in the rate limiting step shifting to elsewhere in that pathway or even to elsewhere in the whole organism. The advent of full-force genomics should enable preventing this response, however, it has been difficult for researchers to know where to turn for guidance. This book aims to help the reader understand and deal with the plasticity of living cell factories and to turn the plasticity into the desired rather than the adverse direction. The book brings together all the recent, most important breakthroughs in this exciting field: Internationally renowned key scientists have reviewed each topic in detail. In the Introduction, the editors give an overview of new approaches and spell out what the engineer and the industry may now really begin to aim for; they even adapt the definition of metabolic engineering to befit the post-genomics era. Other topics included are: the experimental approaches necessary to understand cellular regulation at all of its hierarchical levels, including proteomics [Chapter 2], metabolomics [Chapter 3] and fluxomics [Chapter 4]; new tools that help metabolic engineering [Chapters 5-7]; modeling of living cells, e.g. finding metabolic pathways [Chapter 8] and comparing the actual and predicted use of these in living organisms such as E. coli and Corynebacteria [Chapters 9, 10]; the optimization of cell factories as production organisms (e.g., use of whole cell models, silicon cells, and coordinate manipulation of multiple genes [Chapters 12-15]). A chapter on future perspectives directs further developments of the field in the near future. Metabolic Engineering in the Post Genomic Erais an essential reading for everyone with an interest in engineering living cells including: Metabolic egnineers, bioengineers, biotechnologists, molecular biologists, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.