Mol Biosyst. 2009 Oct;5(10):1214-23. doi: 10.1039/b904729h. Epub 2009 Jul 07.

Systems biology meets synthetic biology: a case study of the metabolic effects of synthetic rewiring.

Molecular bioSystems

Josselin Noirel, Saw Yen Ow, Guido Sanguinetti, Phillip C Wright

PMID: 19756311 DOI: 10.1039/b904729h

Abstract

We present a systems biology approach to study the global metabolic effects of the insertion of synthetic circuits in a cellular chassis. Our approach combines high-throughput proteomics with the MMG probabilistic tool, which integrates the data with the metabolic circuit's topology. We present a theoretical analysis of the foundations of our approach, as well as experimental results on a mutant strain of Escherichia coli where a light-receptor circuit was inserted and coupled with lactose metabolism. Our results show that the systems approach manages to extract meaningful information from the proteomic data that cannot be recovered by naive thresholding of the data. This tool can be used to characterise the relationship between new circuits and chassis in synthetic biology applications.

MeSH terms

• Escherichia coli / metabolism
• Metabolic Networks and Pathways*
• Models, Biological*
• Systems Biology*

Publication Types

• Journal Article
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Grant support

• BB/F018681/1/BB_/Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council/United Kingdom