Background

Metabolic Engineering

An emerging approach to the understanding and utilization of metabolic processes is Metabolic (or pathway) Engineering (ME). As the name implies, ME is the targeted and purposeful alteration of metabolic pathways found in an organism in order to better understand and utilize cellular pathways for chemical transformation, energy transduction, and supramolecular assembly. ME typically involves the redirection of cellular activities by the rearrangement of the enzymatic, transport, and regulatory functions of the cell through the use of recombinant DNA and other techniques. Much of this effort has focused on microbial organisms, but important work is being done in cell cultures derived from plants, insects, and animals. Since the success of ME hinges on the ability to change host metabolism, its continued development will depend critically on a far more sophisticated knowledge of metabolism than currently exists.

This knowledge includes conceptual and technical approaches necessary to understand the integration and control of genetic, catalytic, and transport processes. While this knowledge will be quite valuable as fundamental research, per se, it will also provide the underpinning for many applications of immediate value.

Scope

The Metabolic Engineering Working Group is concerned with increasing the science and engineering community's level of knowledge and understanding of ME. The Working Group strives to encourage and coordinate research in ME within academia, industry, and government in order to synergize the Federal investment in ME.

Introduction

In November 1995, Science Advisor John H. Gibbons of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released the report, "Biotechnology for the 21st Century: New Horizons." This report was a product of the Biotechnology Research Subcommittee (BRS) under OSTP, and identifies priorities for federal investment and specific research opportunities in biotechnology. These priorities include agriculture, the environment, manufacturing and bioprocessing, and marine biotechnology and aquaculture. The BRS formed several working groups to facilitate progress on some of these key priorities. The Metabolic Engineering Working Group (MEWG) was created to foster research in Metabolic Engineering, an endeavor that can contribute to all of the key priorities in the aforementioned report. The Working Group is composed of Federal scientists and engineers who participate as part of the activities of OSTP, and represent all of the major agencies involved in Metabolic Engineering research.

Conference Objective

The Metabolic Engineering Working Group (MEWG) in pursuit of its goals to promote the advancement of metabolic engineering, and coordination of the Federal metabolic engineering research activities for maximum productivity, has organized its fourth inter-agency conference to be held on February 6, 2004.

The conference brings together top research scientists to describe five key areas of investigation, in which metabolic engineering is playing a significant role. These areas are plant science, microbial science, animal and insect science, health science and computational biology. Continued research efforts in these areas will lead to important chemical and engineering information that will enable the realization of the full potential of metabolic engineering within Agriculture, Environmental Biotechnology, Energy Development, Marine Biotechnology, Medicine, and beyond.

The speakers have been selected not only for their own research, but for the overarching knowledge each has about the state of the science within their discipline. They have been asked to identify the problems faced by the scientific community in breaking through the biological codes to better understand the genetic regulatory mechanisms of the organisms they study, the genetic tools and information already utilized and still needed to advance the science, successes made across the scientific community, and why this is so important to the Nation and the World.

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