Starting a New Metabolic Path: JBEI and Berkeley Lab Researchers Develop Technique to Help Metabolic Engineering
Chem.info
By Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Efforts to engineer new metabolic pathways into microbes for the inexpensive production of valuable chemical products, such as biofuels or therapeutic drugs, should get a significant boost in a new development from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). Researchers there have successfully demonstrated a technique they call “targeted proteomics” that speeds up and improves the ability to identify and quantify specific proteins within a cell or microorganism.
“Metabolic engineers and synthetic biologists can use our directed proteomic technique to get useful information about protein levels in their organisms, which in turn can be used to direct valuable followup experiments,” says Christopher Petzold, chemist and deputy director for proteomics at JBEI, who led this research. “We believe that targeted proteomics is a useful tool that fills a much needed gap in efforts to engineer new metabolic pathways for microbes.”
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