Metabolomics tools for the synthetic biology of natural products

Abstract

Metabolomics plays an increasingly central role within the Design-Build-Test cycle of synthetic biology, in particular in applications targeting the discovery, diversification and optimised production of a wide range of natural products. For example, improved methods for the online monitoring of chemical reactions accelerate data generation to be compatible with the rapid iterations and increasing library sizes of automated synthetic biology pipelines. Combinations of label-free metabolic profiling and ¹³C-based flux analysis lead to increased resolution in the identification of metabolic bottlenecks affecting product yield in engineered microbes. And molecular networking strategies drastically increase our ability to identify and characterise novel chemically complex biomolecules of interest in a diverse range of samples.