Software Tools and Methods for Metabolic Engineering

Rewiring of metabolism through metabolic engineering approaches has the potential to provide sustainable fuels, chemicals and medicines as the world works to mitigate and slow down the pace of climate change. However, the multi-facet nature and deep intellectual foundations of metabolic engineering may make the field abstruse to many novices. For example, metabolic engineering is a body of knowledge built with support from an interdisciplinary consortium of fields such as biochemistry, molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics, biotechnology, microbiology, and chemical engineering. To successfully navigate this field requires the learner to be conversant with the parlance of many disciplines and fields outside of their domain knowledge. More importantly, methods for metabolic engineering are catalogued in different journals often outside of the immediate scope of the interdisciplinary field of metabolic engineering. This book aims to guide the readers in learning the methodological approaches of metabolic engineering with the goal of equipping the readers the ability to practise metabolic engineering research. Comprising seven tools and protocols useful for moving the metabolic engineering project from bioinformatics analysis to bacterial transformation and detecting the metabolite of interest using high performance liquid chromatography, the book should be a handy reference for metabolic engineers to revisit concepts that have been learned to help tackle new challenges. Finally, the last tool describes a method for organizing microtubes on ice, which is likely to be useful for busy researchers in molecular biology and biotechnology.