Metabolic Engineering of Industrial Microorganisms

Synthetic biology techniques are powerful and make rigorous modification of microorganisms possible and - omics techniques give us means to determine what is going on in a microorganism. So we have many tools to modify and monitor microorganisms and to use them for optimizing microbial production of chemicals. These methods however do not help us determining HOW the metabolism should be changed to optimize product formation. That's the topic of this course. The course consist of 3 parts: how product formation is linked to metabolism, how metabolism can be changed, and modeling of metabolic fluxes. This will be linked to challenges posed by reactor engineering. E. coli and S. cerevisiae will be used as industrial microorganisms, making products like 1,3-butanediol, succinic acid and triacylglycerides.

• Explain how product formation is linked to microbial metabolism

• Design and optimize product pathways

• Improve and extent a metabolic model and evaluate the product pathway with the model

• Explain how metabolic engineering is linked to reactor engineering

• Written test with open questions (75%)
• Assignment report (25%) Group size: 4-6 students. Late submissions can be handed in at the next resit. The report is about the the metabolic design of converting glucose or methanol into a certain product, following the 10 steps taught, including using a genome scale metabolic model. For the 10 steps 0.35 point is rewarded for every good answer, and 0,35 points for every good discussion. The results obtained for the model can be awarded by 1 point max, a good discussion too. Finally a maximum of 1 point can be given for a good conclusion of the whole report.

BPE22306 Basic Cell Factory Design and MIB20306 Microbial Physiology or similar courses.

• Study material consisting of lectures and articles will become available in Brightspace.