Genome scale engineering techniques for metabolic engineering

Rongming Liu, Marcelo C. Bassalo, Ramsey I. Zeitoun, Ryan T. Gill

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, United States.

Abstract

Metabolic engineering has expanded from a focus on designs requiring a small number of genetic modifications to increasingly complex designs driven by advances in genome-scale engineering technologies. Metabolic engineering has been generally defined by the use of iterative cycles of rational genome modifications, strain analysis and characterization, and a synthesis step that fuels additional hypothesis generation. This cycle mirrors the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle followed throughout various engineering fields that has recently become a defining aspect of synthetic biology. This review will attempt to summarize recent genome-scale design, build, test, and learn technologies and relate their use to a range of metabolic engineering applications.

Keywords: Metabolic engineering; Synthetic biology; Genome scale engineering; Design-Build-Test-Learn.