TNO Announces Development of Metabolomics Toolbox

TNO has announced that it has developed a metabolomics toolbox that is designed to speed up the optimisation of microbial processes in industrial biotechnology, boosting production yield by 50% in nine months; conventional methods result in annual improvements of 1-3%.

The toolbox enables TNO to extract relevant information from large metabolomics data sets and to identify important leads for the genetic improvement of microbial production strains.

Micro-organisms play an important role in the industrial production of food and feed ingredients, medicines and other compounds.

The industry is continuously looking for ways to increase the efficiency and sustainability of such microbial production processes.

One way to achieve commercially viable production levels is through genetic strain improvement, a key aspect in industrial biotechnology.

Current improvement of microbial production strains largely involves interfering with genes that are thought to be important for the respective production process.

However, to a large extent, microbial processes are still a black box: micro-organisms contain over five thousands genes, about half of which have a function that is still unknown.

Therefore, genes are often selected by trial-and-error, wasting time and money on targets that later prove to have little or no importance.

Moreover, important targets may be overlooked. This approach is only able to reach process improvements of, on average, 1-3% a year.

TNO has developed a mtabolomics toolbox which navigates through the black box of cellular metabolism.

This navigator has revealed that microbial production processes can be improved with as much as 50% a year.

The toolbox is systematic, or scientific, in identifying target genes for process development than the trial-and-error method could ever be.

The concept is based on a combination of multivariate data analysis and metabolomics.

Like other genomics technologies, metabolomics is characterised by generating an avalanche of data.

The extraction of relevant information is achieved by calculating the correlation between the large numbers of metabolites measured and the microbial production outcome, TNO has been able to identify the targets that are most relevant for improving the production process, without any bias, thus accelerating process optimisation.

In addition, application of the toolbox has resulted in new insights into cellular metabolism, generating intellectual property opportunities.

TNO has used its metabolomics toolbox for several applications. One example is the production of phenylalanine, a building block for the artificial sweetener aspartame, by the bacterium E. coli. TNO used the toolbox to increase the production yield by 50%.

In addition to industrial biotechnology, the toolbox may be applied for the diagnosis of diseases, the investigation of working mechanisms behind toxic compounds and the determination of metabolites that are important for the experience of taste and smell.