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Increasingly, microbial production processes are being improved by targeted approaches. In directed strain improvement, the selection of the relevant targets is the limiting step in metabolic engineering. Currently, the identification of leads is still a random process relying largely on expert knowledge. Recently, this approach has been complemented by metabolic flux and control analysis approaches. However, both are closed approaches, and biological processes or interactions that are not currently known to exist, or to be important for bioproduct formation, are not taken into account. By contrast, the recently introduced functional genomics technologies enable an open approach towards target selection. In the near future, we might see that metabolomics, and its integration with transcriptomics and/or proteomics into a systems biology approach, in combination with multivariate data analysis tools, will become of increasing importance for the unbiased selection and ranking of targets, not only for strain improvement but also for bioprocess improvement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many organisms have the ability to form spores, a remarkable phase in their life cycles. Compared with vegetative cells, spores have several advantages (e.g. resistance to toxic compounds, temperature, desiccation and radiation) making them well suited to various applications. The applications of spores that first spring to mind are bio-warfare and the related, but more positive, field of biological control. Although they are often considered metabolically inert, spores can also be used as biocatalysts. Other uses for spores are found in the fields of probiotics, tumour detection and treatment, biosensing and in the ‘war against drugs’. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In agricultural and food products, typical quality parameters are sensory properties, shelf-life, safety, health, nutritional value, crop yield per area and disease resistance. It is known that these parameters are importantly determined by the metabolites in the crops and food products. Metabolomics is the state-of-the-art routine technique that can effectively facilitate the improvement of the food chain quality by analyzing key metabolites as efficient quality predictors, to deduce production improvement strategies and for screening and identifying traits for breeding. The aim of this paper is to show such a metabolomics strategy with a special focus on the combination of multiple analytical platforms for sufficient metabolite coverage and a validated multivariate data analysis to reliably determine key metabolites. As a demonstrator for the metabolomics strategy, it was applied to determine the key tomato metabolites with respect to selected sensory attributes. From a literature-based validation study and a comparison to standard used markers, the relevance of the found metabolites was shown. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]