Strategies and challenges for metabolic rewiring

Metabolic engineering is often centred on rewiring cellular metabolism to improve the production of chemicals. Turning cells into efficient factories is challenging because of ubiquitous and tightly regulated metabolic interactions. Tools and strategies from different disciplines, including systems biology, synthetic biology and evolutionary engineering, have been integrated into metabolic engineering to overcome challenges with rewiring metabolism for cell factory development. In this review, we summarise the recent development of tools and strategies for dynamic pathway regulation, compartmentalisation, modular and evolutionary engineering. In addition, we describe how systems biology tools benefit metabolic rewiring for advancing the development of cell factories.