DELISA, M. P. & CONRADO, R. J. (2009) Synthetic metabolic pipelines. Nat Biotech, 27, 728-729.

Excerpt:
Biological routes to producing chemicals hold enormous promise, especially for chemicals that are manufactured from nonrenewable resources or are difficult to generate by traditional synthetic methods. A common strategy is to harness the synthetic potential of living cells expressing engineered metabolic pathways, but this approach often encounters bottlenecks, including diversion of metabolic flux away from the desired product and accumulation of toxic intermediates. In this issue, Dueber et al.1 show that synthetic protein scaffolds can recruit metabolic enzymes in a manner that dramatically improves the production of mevalonate (a precursor to isoprenoids such as the antimalarial drug artemisinin) while lowering the overall cellular metabolic load. This study represents the first use of directed assembly of enzyme complexes for optimizing chemical production in microorganisms and provides a highly complementary technique to the existing metabolic engineering tool kit. Controlling the spatial organization of sequential metabolic enzymes may provide a general strategy for increasing the production of valuable compounds.