METABOLIC ENGINEERING

Catalog description

An engineering approach to microbiology and bio-based products. As bioengineering continues to grow as a discipline, biomanufacturing using "microbial cell factories" continues to pique the interests of the entrepreneur. Commodity compounds, from amino acids to biopolymers, can be manufactured fermentatively. With a growing list of organismal genome sequences available for analysis and manipulation, organisms ( mainly microorganisms) will be utilized and subsequently manipulated by the growing number of molecular biology and synthetic biology techniques available. Students will utilize the methods and concepts taught in this course for problem solving in biotechnology, biomanufacturing and the biopharmaceutical fields. This course discusses cellular and organismal metabolic networks and the mathematical and experimental manipulation of those networks. The techniques of synthetic biology and metabolic flux analysis, core concepts in metabolic engineering, are focused on here. Prerequisites: BIOL1000 , BIOE2000 and ENGR1800 (4 credits)