The role of chemical engineering in modern biotechnology
Special Symposium - Biotechnology
Invited Session on Biotechnology: Honoring Prof. John Villadsen (S-3)
Keywords: systems biology, metabolic engineering, biochemical engineering, biochemicals
Biotechnology is a multifaceted discipline. Traditionally chemical engineers (or biochemical engineers) have played a central role in developing biotech processes and ensuring efficient production of a wide range of biotech products. In recent years chemical engineers have also started to play a central role in developing novel cell factories through the use of so-called metabolic engineering. Metabolic engineering is playing a major role in the development towards a more sustainable chemical industry that is based on microbial fermentation for production of fuels, chemicals, food ingrediens and pharmaceuticals. In the process of designing novel cell factories for the production of various chemicals there is a trend towards the application of platform organisms, e.g. the bacterium Escherichia coli, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the fungus Asperillus niger. These platform organisms are used for the production of many different chemicals. All these chemicals are derived from the 12 key precursor metabolites, which are intermediates of the central carbon metabolism. In order to enable over-production of different chemicals it is hence important to gain fundamental insight into how the fluxes through the central carbon metabolism are controlled as this may enable de-regulation of the central carbon metabolism and hereby tuning of the metabolic network operation towards specific applications. Obviously tools from genomics offer the possibility to analyze the operation of the metabolic network at the global level. Genome-wide transcription analysis is by far the most mature of the omics-technologies, but it is difficult to correlate the transcripts of different genes with activity of different parts of the metabolic network due to the presence of several layers of control. However, through the use of mathematical models of metabolic network as a scaffold for analysis of the transcriptome, we have shown that it is possible to identify global transcriptional structures. Through the use of protein-protein interaction data we have extended this approach to analysis at a larger scale, and hereby identify key regulatory components in the cell. In the lecture some of our recent results in this area will be presented together with a discussion of the wide application of omic-technologies in the field of metabolic engineering. Particularly it will be demonstrated how chemical engineers can play a central role in the emerging research field of systems biology.
Presented Wednesday 19, 15:00 to 15:30, in session Invited Session on Biotechnology: Honoring Prof. John Villadsen (S-3).
