Development of an Analytical Pipeline for Optimizing Substrate Feeding and Eliminating Metabolic Bottlenecks

Attempts were made to design and develop an analytical pipeline for identifying ways of increasing the production of a target metabolite that combine an optimized substrate-feeding schedule with a strategy for identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in metabolic pathways. As a case study, the proposed analytical pipeline was applied to acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation by Clostridium bacteria, a process that has attracted considerable attention as a metabolic system capable of producing butanol, a possible biofuel.