Background
Metabolic Engineering
An emerging approach to the
understanding and utilization of metabolic processes is
Metabolic (or pathway) Engineering (ME). As the name implies,
ME is the targeted and purposeful alteration of metabolic
pathways found in an organism in order to better understand
and utilize cellular pathways for chemical transformation,
energy transduction, and supramolecular assembly. ME typically
involves the redirection of cellular activities by the
rearrangement of the enzymatic, transport, and regulatory
functions of the cell through the use of recombinant DNA and
other techniques. Much of this effort has focused on microbial
organisms, but important work is being done in cell cultures
derived from plants, insects, and animals. Since the success
of ME hinges on the ability to change host metabolism, its
continued development will depend critically on a far more
sophisticated knowledge of metabolism than currently exists.
This knowledge includes conceptual and technical approaches
necessary to understand the integration and control of
genetic, catalytic, and transport processes. While this
knowledge will be quite valuable as fundamental research, per
se, it will also provide the underpinning for many
applications of immediate value.
Scope
The Metabolic Engineering Working Group
is concerned with increasing the science and engineering
community's level of knowledge and understanding of ME. The
Working Group strives to encourage and coordinate research in
ME within academia, industry, and government in order to
synergize the Federal investment in ME.
Introduction
In November 1995, Science Advisor John
H. Gibbons of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
released the report, "Biotechnology for the 21st Century:
New Horizons." This report was a product of the
Biotechnology Research Subcommittee (BRS) under OSTP, and
identifies priorities for federal investment and specific
research opportunities in biotechnology. These priorities
include agriculture, the environment, manufacturing and
bioprocessing, and marine biotechnology and aquaculture. The
BRS formed several working groups to facilitate progress on
some of these key priorities. The Metabolic Engineering
Working Group (MEWG) was created to foster research in
Metabolic Engineering, an endeavor that can contribute to all
of the key priorities in the aforementioned report. The
Working Group is composed of Federal scientists and engineers
who participate as part of the activities of OSTP, and
represent all of the major agencies involved in Metabolic
Engineering research.
Conference Objective
The Metabolic Engineering Working Group
(MEWG) in pursuit of its goals to promote the advancement of
metabolic engineering, and coordination of the Federal
metabolic engineering research activities for maximum
productivity, has organized its fourth inter-agency conference
to be held on February 6, 2004.
The conference brings together top
research scientists to describe five key areas of
investigation, in which metabolic engineering is playing a
significant role. These areas are plant science, microbial
science, animal and insect science, health science and
computational biology. Continued research efforts in these
areas will lead to important chemical and engineering
information that will enable the realization of the full
potential of metabolic engineering within Agriculture,
Environmental Biotechnology, Energy Development, Marine
Biotechnology, Medicine, and beyond.
The speakers have been selected not only
for their own research, but for the overarching knowledge each
has about the state of the science within their discipline.
They have been asked to identify the problems faced by the
scientific community in breaking through the biological codes
to better understand the genetic regulatory mechanisms of the
organisms they study, the genetic tools and information
already utilized and still needed to advance the science,
successes made across the scientific community, and why this
is so important to the Nation and the World.
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