Metabolic Engineering and Synthetic Biology Volume 2

Dear Colleagues,

In times of ever-increasing demand for chemicals and the subsequent increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere, we have to intensify our efforts to establish a circular (bio)economy. To reduce fossil resource use, alternative carbon sources including biomass and CO₂ itself need to be used. The (bio)catalysts of choice that are able to convert these carbon sources into valuable chemicals often have to be tailored to meet the industrial requirements in titer, rate, and yield, and, hence, ultimately in cost. While exciting examples exist, from vitamins to plastic monomers and bioplastics, the metabolic engineering of such biocatalysts is still time and cost consuming. With the improvement of genetic tools and ideas for genetic standardization, creating and/or building new whole-cell biocatalysts becomes an ever more rapid task. However, the two other aspects of the design/build/test cycle are to some extent still very cumbersome. While computational tools support whole-cell biocatalyst design, parallelization and miniaturization speed up the characterization of mutants. Still, the goal has to be a knowledge-based design and a high information content phenotyping.

In this Special Issue, we ask for contributions of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology that are driven by flux and/or metabolome approaches. We would like to emphasize the importance of sample preparation and data evaluation. Fluxes of all intracellular biochemical reaction steps are the ultimate outcome of genetic and environmental alterations. We are convinced that quantitative approaches in metabolite analysis will help to reduce the time required to establish an efficient whole-cell biocatalyst. While the concentrations of intracellular metabolites can highlight enzymatic bottlenecks, the intracellular fluxes might help decipher redox cofactor imbalances, futile cycles, and the use of alternative pathways. Thermodynamically feasible reaction conditions can not only explain the phenotype observed but may also lead to genetic targets for further strain improvement and to new biochemical network designs.

Prof. Dr. Lars M. Blank
Dr. An N. T. Phan
Guest Editors

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