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Lessons from metabolic engineering for functional genomics and drug discovery

Nature Biotechnology volume 17, pages 616–618 (1999)Cite this article

Metabolic engineering is the improvement of industrial organisms using modern genetic tools. For more than a decade, metabolic engineers have studied the physiological consequences of particular genetic changes in microorganisms, plants, and animals, have characterized genome-wide responses of these systems, and have devised mathematical and computational methods to understand connections between genes and cell function. The metabolic engineering goal of identifying genes that confer a particular phenotype is conceptually and methodologically congruent with central issues in drug discovery and functional genomics.

Biological research in the past century has established a rich catalog of complicated metabolic pathways, regulatory networks, and other molecular systems in cells. In spite of great complexity in biology, simplifying assumptions have had an important role in a period of great scientific and technological progress. In the three fields just mentioned, such simplifications are respectively embodied in the terms "rate-limiting step", "drug target," and "function of a gene," each of which is based on the assumption that a single gene's product has a significant effect on the elaborate informational and biochemical networks that operate cells. These concepts clearly share a strong historical imprint, dating from Mendel's demonstration of genetic units, which were defined based on relationships to easily observable phenotypic variants.

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Acknowledgements

Based on the author's opening lecture at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Technological and Medical Implications of Metabolic Control Analysis," Visegrad, Hungary, April 10–16, 1999. The published proceedings of that workshop provide additional details.

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  1. professor of biotechnology at the Institute of Biotechnology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, CH-8093, Switzerland

    James E. Bailey

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Bailey, J. Lessons from metabolic engineering for functional genomics and drug discovery. Nat Biotechnol 17, 616–618 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/10794

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