Systems metabolic engineering of corynebacterium glutamicum for biobased production of chemicals, materials and fuels

Abstract

Systems metabolic engineering integrates systems wide understanding of biological systems with targeted genetic modification towards optimum production performance. Supported by novel powerful tools and technologies from systems biology, strategies for industrial strain engineering evolve more and more from trial and error into knowledge based rational development. For the soil bacterium Corynebacterium glutamicum, a working horse in industrial biotechnology since more than 50 years, this opens a broad avenue to create and shape a versatile cell factory with superior properties for many purposes. As reviewed in this chapter, applications of systems metabolic engineering to C. glutamicum deeply open the new era of sustainable bio-economy with various chemicals, materials and fuels obtained from renewable feed stocks. Additionally, a first example from lysine production gives a flavor on the next future level of strain engineering, i.e. synthetic metabolic engineering, enabling genome scale models and synthetic biology for a priori global strain design.