Computer-Assisted Strain Construction And Development Engineering (CASCADE)

The recent advances of modern high-throughput genomic technologies have resulted in a large number of fully sequenced microbial organisms. The construction of these comprehensive metabolic models serves many purposes including encapsulating all the data and allowing for in silco experiments to be performed that can drive experimental work and aid in strain development and optimization. The creation of a full metabolic reconstruction requires a significant amount of manual work; an automated procedure for rapidly developing metabolic models would be extremely valuable for the biotechnology field. We intend to develop a fully automated procedure for creating the metabolic reconstruction based on sequence data analysis and develop an automated analysis to determine growth and substrate utilization and protein production capability. The combination of automating the sequenced based metabolic reconstruction and downstream analysis of chemical production capabilities will rapidly produce fully functioning metabolic models with predictive power. These models will significantly increase productivity and decrease the time and effort required for strain design and aid in bioprocessing and chemical production.