Fig. 1.

Overview of the modeling strategies in the metabolic engineering research. (A) Data from different sources are used to construct (B) the metabolic pathways that produces the substance of interest. (C) An appropriate computational modeling approach is used to simulate the pathway response to a given perturbation in silico. The simulation results are analyzed to identity key regulatory steps, such as bottlenecks, which will then be tested using data from different conditions (e.g. gene knockouts or different growth conditions) (figure adapted from Helmy et al., 2009). (D) Finally, the model predictions are experimentally validated.