Enumerating metabolic pathways for the production of heterologous target chemicals in chassis organisms

To select the best pathways to engineer, we have developed an objective function that computes the cost of inserting a heterologous pathway in a given chassis organism. In order to find minimum-cost pathways, we propose in this paper two methods based on steady state analysis and network topology that are to the best of our knowledge, the first to enumerate all possible heterologous pathways linking a target compounds to a source set of compounds. In the context of metabolic engineering, the source set is composed of all naturally produced chassis compounds (endogenuous chassis metabolites) and the target set can be any compound of the chemical space. We also provide an algorithm for identifying precursors which can be supplied to the growth media in order to increase the number of ways to synthesize specific target compounds.We find the topological approach to be faster by several orders of magnitude than the steady state approach. Yet both methods are generally scalable in time with the number of pathways in the metabolic network. Therefore this work provides a powerful tool for pathway enumeration with direct application to biosynthetic pathway design.Metabolism is the process of synthesis and degradation of molecules occurring in living organisms. Metabolism is generally represented as a network where metabolites are interconnected by reactions. In order to give a functional description of metabolism, metabolic networks are often decomposed into separated parts, called metabolic pathways. The description of metabolism through metabolic pathways is useful, even though any division in pathways is arbitrary, because it helps in modeling and understanding the behavior of the full network. A metabolic pathway can be defined as a coherent set of enzyme-catalyzed biochemical reactions by which a living organism transforms a set of source compounds into a set of target compounds. By regulating enzyme and protein synthesis, living organisms can adapt to different environ