Engineering biology: from biodiversity to “designer microorganisms”

As one major role of European industry’s future global competitiveness, industrial “white” biotechnology is regarded as a key technology in a sustainable economic future of modern industrialized societies, combining efficiency, the use of renewable resources and environmental friendliness to produce high-value products. Thereby, the combination of highly efficient and effective enzymes with heavily engineered microorganisms, can face improvement of existing processes or enable novel product ideas, thus paving the way to a knowledge-based bioeconomy.^1,2 The replacement of traditional chemical processes by multi-step biosynthetic reactions in sustainable processes is based on fairly recent technological innovations in the fields of microbial genomics, metagenomics^3,4, enzyme discovery, in-vitro and in-vivo evolution⁵. Beyond, systems biology has revealed great insights into metabolic pathways and regulatory networks, extending the knowledge for the rational construction and for the bio-inspired design of producer microorganisms. Recent advances will enable metabolic engineers to predict, design, and build streamlined microbial cell factories with reduced time and effort⁶.

1     European Commission: EUROPE 2020, 2010

2     European Commission, 2012

3     Lorenz P. and Eck J., Nature Reviews Microbiology, 5, 510-516, 2005

4     Eck J., Gabor E., Liebeton K., Meurer G., Niehaus F., Protein Engineering Handbook, Wiley-VCH Weinheim, 295-323, 2009

5     Gabor E., Niehaus F., Aehle W. and Eck J., J. Mol. Biol., 418, 16-20, 2012

6     Mampel J., Buescher J.M., Meurer G. and Eck J., Trends Biotechnol., 31, 52-60, 2013