Congratulations to our team members Egils Stalidzans and Elina Dace for publishing their developed novel concept of Sustainable Metabolic Engineering in the prestigious Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal! The paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2021.08.034 In the paper, Sustainable Metabolic Engineering concept is proposed to assess and optimize the sustainability of biotechnological production that can be derived from the features of metabolism of the exploited organism. The Sustainable Metabolic Engineering concept is optimization of metabolism where economic, environmental and societal sustainability parameters of all incoming and outgoing fluxes and produced biomass of the applied organisms are considered. The extension of characterising features of strains designed by metabolic engineering methods with sustainability estimation enables ab initio improvement of the biotechnological production design.
Figure 1. The scope of impact vs. the scope of system's boundaries in biotechnological production.
The research is supported by the European Regional Development Fund within the projects “Decision Support Tool for an Integrated Food Waste Valorisation System (DeSTInation)” (project No. 1.1.1.2/VIAA/3/19/528) and “Sustainable Microbial Valorisation of Waste Lipids into Biosurfactants” (project No. 1.1.1.1/19/A/047).