Review
Synthetic biology is the engineering approach to edit or write the
genome aiming to design the biological devices (promoters, transcription
factors, TFBS, terminators etc.) of an organism to achieve the improved
properties, while, metabolic engineering aiming to engineer the microbes
to produce metabolites on industrial scale through recombinant DNA
technologies. Recently, both synthetic biology and metabolic engineering
fields are growing quickly and are used to produce metabolites of
interest. The main theme of Synthetic Biology –Metabolic Engineering book is to review the tools and techniques used in
synthetic biology and metabolic engineering to design and engineer the
microbes to produce value-added metabolites and its application in
industrial biotechnology. The book is written by the world-renowned
metabolic engineers and synthetic biologists in series of Advances in
Biochemical Engineering/Biotechnology and primarily elaborates the
synergy between metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.
In the section of Tools Development, Baumann and co-workers elaborates
the development and application of pyrrolysine based system used for the
translation of orthogonal proteins, a process to produce site-specific
labelled recombinant proteins and peptides.
Deaner and Alper elaborates different strategies for the engineering and
discovery of promoters and terminators to alter the gene expression of
any gene. Specifically, this chapter emphasis on the methodologies for
the rational construction, prediction, and characterization of synthetic
promoters/terminators and its application in different organisms.
The team lead by An-Ping Zeng delivers a broad overview of natural
biomolecular switches, recent advances in engineering of bio-switches
(protein-based, RNA-based) and their application for dynamic metabolic
control.
Huimin Zhao’s team elaborates the design, construction and optimization
of pathway in the present review. Specifically, different strategies
developed by metabolic engineers and synthetic biologist for the design,
construction and optimization (transcriptional and translational level)
of metabolic pathways to produce chemicals in microbes were discussed.
Moreover, the experimental tools to improve/construct the metabolic
synthetic pathway and computational algorithms to construct efficient
metabolic pathway were also discussed.
As the name indicates, “synthetic biology for cell-free biosynthesis”
elaborates the different strategies to design new biochemical pathways
for the in vitro enzymatic synthesis of fine chemicals written by
Gaspar Morgado and coworkers. Cell-free biosynthesis is a single step
process and a promising tool to perform complex catalysis.
Meng and Chen emphasize the use of synthetic biology to produce
polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA)—family of biocompatible and biodegradable
polyesters. Initially the metabolic pathways for the synthesis of PHA in
different microbes and diversity of PHA were discussed. Then,
engineering strategies for the synthesis of PHA were also discussed.
Turner and coworkers debated about recent approaches (both combinatorial
and rational) for the engineering and evolution of Saccharomyces
cerevisiae to produce biofuels (i.e. butanol, ethanol, 2,3-butanediol)
and metabolites (i.e. isoprenoids, antioxidants) from different carbon
sources (i.e. lactose, glucose, arabinose, xylose, mannitol, cellobiose,
alginate, galactose and acetate).
Becker and coworkers highlighted the implementation of synthetic and
system biology strategies for the engineering of industrially importantCorynebacterium glutamicum to produce value-added metabolites.
Guo and coworkers compiled the basics of 13C-MFA
(metabolic flux analysis) in this chapter and demonstrated the
application of 13C-MFA to detect the rate-limiting
steps in the pathway for the target metabolite which is of great
importance in the metabolic engineering.
The last chapter written by Schmidt and coworkers illustrates
up-to-the-minute ethical aspects of new-to nature organism and
xenobiology—an emerging field of synthetic biology that implies the
re-design of biology.
This book is highly recommended for synthetic biologist, metabolic
engineers and natural product scientists to have up-to-the-minute
knowledge regarding tools/techniques used in synthetic biology and
metabolic engineering