Daily Newsletter April 11, 2012

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Today's Topic: Looking for novel pathways

As discussed today, one microbial endeavor is to discover novel metabolic pathways or products that have applications in the modern world. Here are three research areas influenced by looking for novel pathways (even multispecies pathways).

• metabolic engineering
• We've talked a little about this previously.
• metabolic network analysis
•  This is looking at the overall metabolic pathways of an organism or a system of organisms, including looking at the relative activities of different pathways.
• metabolic network reconstruction
•  As the name implies, this is dealing with reconstructing the entire metabolic network of organisms and even assemblages of organisms.

The idea here is to learn about the metabolic capabilities of an organism (at various conditions) or a community/assemblage of organisms. With this information, researches can maximize a system or even engineer new systems.  But you first must find the systems?  That is the million dollar question.  Some times it is by accident.  Other times it is the product of specific experimental design.  Organisms that degrade oil were "discovered" when people started looking in areas with native oil deposits, and then tried to isolate organisms that grew on specific oil products. 

Currently known organisms could also have novel pathways.  Genomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics can all help find novel pathways.  What is important first is that you start looking.

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Daily Challenge:
Discuss the importance of new metabolic pathways and products. Look up some of the recent discoveries. Why is it important that we look for novel pathways? What effect could these have on medicine, industry, or even society?