Systems Metabolic Engineering of Escherichia coli for Chemicals, Materials, Biofuels, and Pharmaceuticals

Microorganisms are small but efficient micro-factories for producing bulk and value-added products. Systems biology and synthetic biology advanced during the last decade are enabling us to unravel the underlying complicated intracellular and intercellular mechanisms, to comprehensively understand them as a whole, and to rationally reconstruct metabolic and gene regulatory networks for the optimized production of target materials including non-innate materials. Recent advances in these fields have opened a new way of metabolic engineering, termed systems metabolic engineering. In this article, we review the achievements in systems metabolic engineering for the production of chemical compounds and materials, biofuels, and pharmaceuticals in a widely used microbial platform factory, Escherichia coli.