Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS
The ability to design, construct, and optimize a metabolic pathway for synthesis of
value-added chemicals with high efficiency and fidelity has opened the doors for many
possibilities. Biological catalysis via engineered microorganisms can offer a competitive
advantage over traditional chemical synthesis, and will have not only economic benefits,
but also environmental benefits. Many chemicals, fuels, and materials can now be produced
by recombinant microorganisms from renewable feedstock such as plant biomass. However,
there are still many future challenges. With the thrust to consider and design cellular
systems like computer
modularity across systems has become significant, as
demonstrated by the BioBrick
TM
methodology. With modularity will come a drive for
customizable strains that can be engineered rapidly for a single specific task at an industrial
level.
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This has already been shown by entrepreneurial companies like Ginkgo BioWorks.
The rapid construction and optimization of a pathway will become paramount to be
competitive with industrial standards of traditional chemical synthesis. Perhaps more
relevant than rapid construction and optimization is a full understanding of heterologous
gene expression. Pathway design tools like BNICE can identify a significant number of genes
to be used for a pathway, but there is no guarantee that the gene will be expressed in the
host organism. This has already proven to be a significant setback in
S. cerevisae
, wherein
many pathways which have been successful in
E. coli
will not be processed similarly in
yeast, based mainly on gene expression. Beyond pathway engineering, another future
direction will be controlling pathways of whole microbial consortia which communicate via
molecular signaling. Mixed populations within a culture will be able to independently
coordinate their different gene expression to achieve more complex tasks than just a single
pathway.
'
parts,
'
Acknowledgments
We thank the National Institutes of Health (GM077596), the National Academies Keck
Futures Initiative
on
Synthetic Biology, the Energy Biosciences Institute, and the National Science Foundation as part of the Center for
Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis (CENTC), CHE-0650456 for financial support in our synthetic
biology projects.
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