Metabolic Engineering and Its Applications in Various Industries

Description

Optimizing genetic and regulatory functions within cells to boost a cell's synthesis of a specific substance is known as metabolic engineering. These are chemical networks that let cells to transform raw resources into molecules required for the survival of the cell through a series of biochemical reactions and enzymes. In particular, metabolic engineering aims to mathematically model these networks determine the yield of useful products and identify the network components that limit the production of these products.

The ability to employ these organisms to manufacture valuable compounds on an industrial scale efficiently is the ultimate goal of metabolic engineering. The production of beer, wine, cheese, pharmaceuticals and other biotechnology goods are current examples. As cells depend on these metabolic networks to survive, alterations can have a significant impact on the viability of the cells. As a result, in metabolic engineering, trade-offs must be made between the cell's ability to produce the required material and its need for survival. Therefore, the current focus is on targeting the regulatory networks in a cell to efficiently engineer the metabolism rather than directly deleting and/or overexpressing the genes that encode for metabolic enzymes. In the past, a microorganism was genetically altered by chemically inducing mutation and the mutant strain that overexpressed the target metabolite was then selected in order to maximize the productivity of the desired metabolite. One of the key issues with this method was that the metabolic pathway for the production of that metabolite was not examined, so the production limitations and pertinent pathway enzymes that needed to be modified were unknown. Metabolic engineering is becoming more practical and economical on an industrial scale. More than 50 biorefinery facilities are being built across North America according to the biotechnology industry organization. Metabolic engineering is used to manufacture biofuels and chemicals from renewable biomass that can help lower greenhouse gas emissions. Short-chain alcohols and alkanes, fatty acid methyl esters and fatty alcohols and biofuels based on fatty acids and isoprenoids are all examples of potential biofuels. With the help of innovations in synthetic biology and advancements in our understanding of metabolite damage and how to prevent or repair it, metabolic engineering processes and efficiency are continuing to improve. Early metabolic engineering experiments shown that if corresponding damage control systems are absent or insufficient, buildup of reactive intermediates can limit flux in constructed pathways and be harmful to host cells. Synthetic biologists improve genetic pathways, which therefore have an impact on cellular metabolic outputs. Recent reductions in the price of synthetic DNA and advancements in genetic circuits have an impact on metabolic engineering's capacity to achieve desired results. The first step in the procedure is to decide what desired outcome you want to attain by enhancing or changing an organism's metabolism. Research on the reactions and metabolic processes that can result in this substance or outcome is conducted using reference materials and online resources. These databases are replete with genetic and chemical data, including metabolic and other biological process pathways. An organism that will be employed to produce the intended product or result is selected using this research. When making this choice, factors such how closely the organism's metabolic pathway resembles the required pathway, how expensive it is to maintain the organism and how simple it is to change the organism's pathway are taken into account. To determine the potential yield of the product or the reaction fluxes in the cell, the finished metabolic pathway is mathematically modeled. The frequency with which a specific network reaction takes place is known as a flux. Simple metabolic pathway analysis can be carried out manually, however the majority of computations require the use of software. To solve these models, these applications employ sophisticated linear algebraic techniques. The necessary data regarding the pertinent reactions and their fluxes must be supplied in order to solve a network using the equation for determined systems presented below. It is crucial to identify which reactions can be changed in order to maximize the yield of the target product after solving for the fluxes of reactions in the network. Utilizing computational techniques like Opt Gene or Opt Flux is important to decide which specific genetic alterations to carry out. They offer suggestions for the genes that have to be overexpressed, eliminated or added to a cell in order to increase production of the desired product. The required genetic changes can be carried out using conventional molecular biology methods. Depending on how they affect the pathway and the end aim, genes may be overexpressed or eliminated from an organism. It is frequently important to have certain fluxes known or experimentally observed in order to build a solvable model. Additionally, experimental measurements of the network's fluxes are required to confirm the impact of genetic modifications on the metabolic network. Carbon flow measurements are conducted using carbon-13 isotope tagging to measure reaction fluxes.