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Grand Challenge Commentary: Transforming biosynthesis into an information science

Nature Chemical Biology volume 6, pages 859–861 (2010)Cite this article

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Engineering biosynthetic pathways to natural products is a challenging endeavor that promises to provide new therapeutics and tools to manipulate biology. Information-guided design strategies and tools could unlock the creativity of a wide spectrum of scientists and engineers by decoupling expertise from implementation.

Information about a thing is often more valuable than the thing itself. This is certainly true for a given protein sequence derived from genomic or metagenomic data. For an enzyme, further knowledge about its substrate and product specificities, catalytic activities and expression characteristics is invaluable in determining and understanding its role in the cell. The use of this information to construct natural and new metabolic and biosynthetic pathways goes hand in hand with the identification and analysis of biosynthetic enzymes and pathways found in nature, an undertaking that has its roots in the earliest biochemical studies and continues today. Indeed, the in vitro reconstruction of metabolic pathways is a gold standard for parsing their essential components1.

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Figure 1: Transforming the design of synthetic metabolic pathways into an information science.

MARINA CORRAL

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Travis S. Bayer is in the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, Imperial College London, London, UK.,

    Travis S Bayer

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  1. Travis S Bayer
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Correspondence to Travis S Bayer.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Bayer, T. Grand Challenge Commentary: Transforming biosynthesis into an information science. Nat Chem Biol 6, 859–861 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.487

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