Genome-scale analysis for new metabolic engineering procedures

Bernhard D. Palsson, University of California, San Diego

With the sequence of E. coli becoming available, genome-scale models of its metabolism have been developed. These models have gone through an iterative model-building procedure and now contain over 900 reactions and over 500 metabolites. These genome-scale models can be used to analyze, interpret and even predict the metabolic genotype-phenotype relationship in E. coli. Most importantly, these models have been able to predict the outcome of adaptive evolution for both wild-type and knock-out strains. This opens up the possibility of designing robust and stable strains for bioprocessing. This goal may now have become reachable in the short term due to the application of optimization methods to determine exhaustively the all such designs based on the genome-scale network. If successful, this procedure would now enable us not only to predict the metabolic genotype-phenotype relationship, but also design it.

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