Pathway Design

Designing metabolic pathways is one of the first steps undertaken in a metabolic engineering project. The process of pathway design is presented in four parts: (i) definition of the biochemical search space; (ii) pathway search to extract metabolic pathways connecting the target compound with metabolic precursor molecules from the host organism; (iii) enzyme assignment for each reaction step; and (iv) the evaluation of pathways, e.g. in terms of stoichiometry within the host metabolism, thermodynamics, kinetics. These four steps help to design a pathway in silico, thus maximizing the chance of success of the pathway expression in vivo.