(44a) Systems Biotechnology: Making Systems Biology Work

Systems biology allows us to understand biological fundamentals and phenomena at a much larger scale than before. Nowadays, development of biotechnological applications is also relying on information deciphered through systems biological studies. For the production of various bioproducts, systems metabolic engineering, which is metabolic engineering combined with systems biology and synthetic biology, is essential to make the whole process optimized. In this lecture, I will present the general strategies for systems metabolic engineering of microorganisms for the efficient production of chemicals and materials, with several example products such as diamines, biofuels and biopolymers. Bio-based production of chemicals and materials is not the only field that benefits from systems biology. For example, systems biology can be applied for drug targeting and discovery. Using pathogenic bacteria such as Acinetobacter baumanii and Vibrio vulnificus as examples, construction of genome-scale metabolic models, analyses of metabolite essentiality together with reaction essentiality, network topology analysis, and their use for systematical prediction of drug targets will be presented. From now on, systems biotechnology will be an essential paradigm in industrial biotechnology as well as medical biotechnology.

This work is supported by the Advanced Biomass R&D Center and Korean Systems Biology Project from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) through the National Research Foundation of Korea. Further support by the Converging Research Center program and the WCU program from the MEST is appreciated.