Engineering aspects of beta-lactam biosynthesis

The adaptation of an existing industrial production line to boost production capacity (a hardware analogue of strain improvement) or to enable the production of a derivative of the original product is used as an example to explore the similarities between process design and engineering and metabolic pathway engineering. In the two fields the same principles appear to apply: for most process engineering solutions metabolic pathway engineering analogues can be found. Analogues are illustrated by reference to literature (e.g. overproduction of amino acid precursors at the 'bottom' of the pathway, relocalisation of proteins and overexpression of genes from the secondary metabolism). Some possible future applications are defined (e.g. supervisory manipulations as regulation by gene transcription factors).