Metabolic engineering in theframe of SmartCell

The large integrated EU-project called “SmartCell - Rational Design of Plant Systems for Sustainable Generation of Value-Added Industrial Products” soon enters its final year. The consortium project is a joined effort of 14 leading European academic laboratories and four industrial partners in order to create a comprehensive knowledge base of how secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathways operate in plants. Our focus is on terpenoids, the largest class of secondary metabolites, which exhibit extremely diverse biological and pharmaceutical activities. However, all knowledge and tools are generic and broadly applicable to engineer any plant biosynthetic pathway. The case study module i.e. the manufacturing of a valuable terpenoid in an optimized large-scale system gives SmartCell a unique opportunity to directly make transition from fundamental science to application. For long-term exploitation an integrated database, compound library, cell culture collection and a genebank available for academic and industrial communities are established.
The presentation will give a general overview of the consortium activities but will focus especially on the metabolic pathway characterization at systems level involving metabolic profiling methods. To this end a list of candidate genes resulting from gene discovery and functional screening exercises is evaluated in the model plant tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) and periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) cell and organ systems via single and multigene expression. Various analytical platforms incl. especially NMR and bioinformatics tools are used for monitoring corresponding metabolic changes.