Pathway and protein engineering approaches to produce novel and commodity small molecules.

Nature has provided us the basis of designing the most integrated and efficacious production platforms. Cell factories via their millions of years of evolution have nearly perfected each of their production systems. We have been trying to imitate, utilize and tweak this system to our advantage by using slightly overlapping and greatly interdependent approaches such as metabolic engineering and systems biology to make nature work for us in an efficient and robust way, without producing toxic waste and/or unnecessary side products. Systems biology, metabolic engineering and 'omics' technologies have paved the way for protein and pathway engineering. To this end we will talk about the recent advances in production of novel pharmaceutical and commodity small molecules by designing novel proteins and pathways.