Editorial

Systems biology and biological systems diversity for the engineering of microbial cell factories

Pau Ferrer

Department of Chemical Engineering, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193-Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Spain

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Microbial Cell Factories 2007, 6:35doi:10.1186/1475-2859-6-35

Published:	20 November 2007

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Metabolic engineering was originally conceived as a systems approach to optimise biotechnologically desired traits of microbes and higher cells [1]. Microbial Cell Factories has published several review and research articles on this field over the past recent years [2-8]. Although clear breakthroughs have been achieved in the past, progress in metabolic engineering has been largely limited to individual pathways or relatively simple networks. Engineering of complex metabolic networks has been hampered by the insufficient biological information and global analytical tools.