Metabolic Engineering Opening New Avenues for Therapeutics

Abstract

Metabolic engineering involves advantageous manipulations in the metabolic pathways of suitable organisms for better yield of valuable metabolites like pharmaceuticals, fuels, dairy products, and cosmetics. In classical approach, cellular metabolism is altered by changing enzyme kinetics or regulatory proteins by employing genetic engineering tools, thus enhancing the yield of a metabolite or producing a novel bio-product. Several strategies like upregulation/downregulation of key enzymes, elimination of toxic by-products, removing feedback inhibition, reducing competition, and engineering transporters/co-factors may be employed to optimize an engineered process in suitable host like bacteria. In this chapter, a broad overview of metabolic engineering is presented, describing various strategies of metabolic engineering, plant metabolic engineering, microbial metabolic engineering with evident examples and challenges of metabolic engineering.