Muiznieks, R.; Dace, E.; Stalidzans, E. Integrated Sustainability Score Implementation as an Objective Function in Sustainable Metabolic Engineering. Fermentation2023, 9, 548.
Muiznieks, R.; Dace, E.; Stalidzans, E. Integrated Sustainability Score Implementation as an Objective Function in Sustainable Metabolic Engineering. Fermentation 2023, 9, 548.
Muiznieks, R.; Dace, E.; Stalidzans, E. Integrated Sustainability Score Implementation as an Objective Function in Sustainable Metabolic Engineering. Fermentation2023, 9, 548.
Muiznieks, R.; Dace, E.; Stalidzans, E. Integrated Sustainability Score Implementation as an Objective Function in Sustainable Metabolic Engineering. Fermentation 2023, 9, 548.
Abstract
The sustainable metabolic engineering (SME) concept was defined by Stalidzans and Dace as an approach for the selection of most sustainable metabolic engineering designs taking the economic, environmental and social components of sustainability into account. In the centre of sustainability calculations is a genome scale metabolic model that provides full balance of all incoming and outgoing metabolic fluxes at steady state. Therefore, sustainability indicators are assigned for each exchange reaction enabling calculation of sustainability features of consumption or production of each metabolite.
The further development of the SME concept depends on its implementation at the computational level to acquire applicable results – sustainable production strain designs. This study proposes for the first time a workflow and tools of SME implementation using constraint based stoichiometric modelling, genome scale metabolic models and growth coupled product synthesis approach.
For SME application demonstration purposes, a relatively simple engineering task has been carried out. The most sustainable designs have been identified using Escherichia coli as chassis organism, glucose as a substrate and gene deletions as metabolic engineering tool. A growth coupled production design tool has been used to reduce the variability of sustainability.
The 10 000 most sustainable designs were producing succinate as the main product with the number of deleted genes ranging from two to ten. A big number of similar designs has been identified due to the combinatorial explosion of different alternative combinations of gene deletion sets that result in interruption of the same metabolic pathways with the same impact on the metabolism.
Keywords
economic sustainability; environmental sustainability; social sustainability; genome scale metabolic model; metabolic engineering; growth coupled production
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biology and Biotechnology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
