NEW INSIGHTS ON THE MONITORING OF A BIOTRANSFORMATION PROCESS USING SYSTEMS BIOLOGY

Monitoring is one of the most important tasks previous to control and to optimize a bioprocess. Signalling intermediates are usually not employed to monitor a bioprocess since they are involved in complex networks. However, Systems Biology can help to understand this complexity in order to develop new monitoring agents. In this work, we predicted with the help of a model, which included the signalling pathways related to carnitine metabolism, that the signal factor cAMP can be used to monitor the biotransformation of trimethylammonium compounds into L-carnitine. Experiments in high density cell continuous reactors of E. coli using different carbon sources assessed these findings.