Cartoon of an engineered cell. Four distinct strategies have been combined to illustrate a synthetic biology approach to metabolic engineering. The engineered pathway is encoded by a synthetic operon designed from standard parts/components including tunable intergenic regions (TIGRs) that provide differential control over mRNA stability [41]. An upstream device/module, a transcriptional modular AND gate acts as a master regulator by requiring two separate inputs to turn on expression of the pathway [15]. The enzymes have been tagged with a peptide ligand that binds them to a synthetic protein scaffold, forming a complex of colocalized pathway enzymes [27]. The central metabolism of the host/chassis has been modified to interface with the engineered system/network, providing a sufficient flux of necessary precursors and cofactors as well as increased transporters to facilitate product secretion [7]. This image was generated in TinkerCell.
