Back to the Future: Redesign of Central Metabolism

In one aspect, metabolic engineering started from analysis and redesign of central metabolism, including glycolysis, TCA cycle, and amino acid pathways. These efforts established the early stages of metabolic engineering and set a solid foundation of Industrial microbiology.  As the genomic tools become sophisticated, metabolic engineers are increasingly concerned about global regulations and terminal pathways that lead to specialty chemicals or secondary metabolites.  However, the major limitation of microbial processes could arguably be attributed to the central metabolic networks.  For example, the basic glycolytic pathway loses one third of carbon to produce acetyl-coA, which is the precursor for a wide variety of products.  We will discuss how central metabolic networks are re-designed to improve the major bottlenecks of microbial processes.