Systems and synthetic metabolic engineering for amino acid production – the heartbeat of industrial strain development

With a world market of more than four million tons per year, l-amino acids are among the most important products in industrial biotechnology. The recent years have seen a tremendous progress in the development of tailor-made strains for such products, intensively driven from systems metabolic engineering, which upgrades strain engineering into a concept of optimization on a global scale. This concept seems especially valuable for efficient amino acid production, demanding for a global modification of pathway fluxes – a challenge with regard to the high complexity of the underlying metabolism, superimposed by various layers of metabolic and transcriptional control.

► Systems metabolic engineering upgrades strain engineering into a global scale concept. ► Metabolic engineers have to tackle complex metabolic and regulatory networks. ► Synthetic cell factories reach the benchmarks set by classical production strains. ► Artificial pathways give access to non-natural compounds. ► Systems metabolic engineering is increasing the heartbeat of industrial strain development.