Dynamic control in metabolic engineering: Theories, tools, and applications.

Metabolic engineering has allowed the production of a diverse number of valuable chemicals using microbial organisms. Many biological challenges for improving bio-production exist which limit performance and slow the commercialization of metabolically engineered systems. Dynamic metabolic engineering is a rapidly developing field that seeks to address these challenges through the design of genetically encoded metabolic control systems which allow cells to autonomously adjust their flux in response to their external and internal metabolic state.

Engineering Microbial Metabolite Dynamics and Heterogeneity.

As yields for biological chemical production in microorganisms approach their theoretical maximum, metabolic engineering requires new tools, and approaches for improvements beyond what traditional strategies can achieve. Engineering metabolite dynamics and metabolite heterogeneity is necessary to achieve further improvements in product titers, productivities, and yields. Metabolite dynamics, the ensemble change in metabolite concentration over time, arise from the need for microbes to adapt their metabolism in response to the extracellular environment and are important for controlling growth and productivity in industrial fermentations.

Optimization of a yeast RNA interference system for controlling gene expression and enabling rapid metabolic engineering.

Reduction of endogenous gene expression is a fundamental operation of metabolic engineering, yet current methods for gene knockdown (i.e., genome editing) remain laborious and slow, especially in yeast.