Genome-scale metabolic models enable global analysis of microbial metabolism by considering all metabolic reactions simultaneously.
The marriage of flux model generation and customized model reconstruction is of great benefit to biologists since they can easily validate or refute hypotheses in microbial metabolism by drafting and comparing numerous metabolic models.
The pathways used by the better-studied species were also found to be conserved in the newly discovered species that predominate in subsurface environments undergoing bioremediation, suggesting that the current metabolic model for G. sulfurreducens[ 20] provides a good foundation for broader modeling of microbial metabolism in contaminated subsurfaces during bioremediation.
The model prediction also underestimated the biofilm formation for the low iron concentration (i.e., 0.05-fold of the reference iron concentration), which may be due to the lack of the regulation in the model for microbial metabolism which is controlled by quorum sensing signaling (e.g., the pqs quorum-sensing mentioned above).
Genome-scale models of microbial metabolism are increasingly being used in biological discovery and metabolic engineering.
Despite all these efforts there still exists a gap in the quality between the available metabolic reconstructions for yeast and corresponding models for microbial metabolism.
As the Biotechnology Component Deputy Director, he helps drive the development of experimental and computational approaches to develop models of microbial metabolism, gene regulation, and signal transduction.
This effort contributes an approach to generalized modeling of microbial metabolism that will be useful for a theoretically and mechanistically principled approach to biogeochemical analysis.
The metabolic reconstruction itself often leads to the discovery of novel functions, pathways, and phenotypic traits, whereas the reconstructed network can be used for mathematical modeling of microbial metabolism and quantitative predictions for genetic engineering.
Computational reconstruction and analysis of cellular models of microbial metabolism is one of the great success stories of systems biology, and much more needs to be learned from the many microbial components of mutualistic microbiomes that inhabit mammals.
