Metabolic engineering is a young field, just over 15 years old. During this period, it has developed a well-defined methodology and a focused research portfolio of rich intellectual content and particular relevance to biotechnology and biological engineering. Its goal is to harness the immense potential of microorganisms for the production of useful products, in particular from renewable resources. This it does by engineering the cellular metabolism such as to favor product-forming pathways while maintaining normal cellular functions. After many successful applications, Metabolic Engineering now needs to adapt itself to rapid changes whereby we have instead of too few genes lots and lots of genes and, instead of a handful of measurements, avalanches of data. Although the focus (e.g. improving cells) and a central component (e.g. assessing cell physiology) of metabolic engineering remain the same, new tools are required to take advantage of these developments. Such tools will come from a systemic view of cellular function and will strengthen the integrating and quantifying aspects that have given this field its unique identity.

In this talk we will review how metabolic engineering, as a field, helped crystallize these concepts along with the main challenges in aligning metabolic engineering with the goals and mind-frame of the new biology. New concepts of importance in the post-genomic era will be presented that allow the engineering of cells to elicit multigenic properties, a task difficult to achieve following the usual single gene paradigm. These ideas will be illustrated with examples from applications of Metabolic Engineering to the production of chemical products and biofuels from renewable resources.

Dr. Gregory Stephanopoulos is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He received his B.S. Degree from the National Technical University of Athens, M.S. Degree from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. Degree form the University of Minnesota, all in Chemical Engineering. He joined, upon graduation in 1978, the Chemical Engineering Faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where he served as Assistant and Associate Professor until 1985. In 1985 he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT where he has been ever since. He served as Associate Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center between 1990 and 1997 and in 2001 he was appointed Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

    Professor Stephanopoulos' current research focuses on metabolic engineering and its applications to the production of biochemicals and specialty chemicals, the rigorous evaluation of cell physiology using advanced isotopic methods, the metabolism and physiology of mammalian cells with emphasis on obesity and diabetes, and bioinformatics and functional genomics, whereby new genomics-based technologies are applied to the elucidation of cell physiology and metabolic engineering. Professor Stephanopoulos has co-authored or -edited 5 books and published approximately 230 papers and 15 patents. He has supervised 35 graduate and 30 post-doctoral students and is presently the editor-in-chief of the journal Metabolic Engineering and serves on the Editorial Boards of 7 scientific journals. He has been recognized with the Dreyfus Foundation Teacher Scholar Award (1982), Excellence in Teaching Award (1984), Technical Achievement Award of the AIChE (1984), PYI Award (1984), AIChE-FPBE Division Award (1997), M.J. Johnson Award of ACS (2001), the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of the AIChE (2001), Charles Thorn Award from the Society for Industrial Microbiology, 2007 and AIChE Founders Award, 2007. In 1992 he chaired the FPBE Division of AIChE and was elected a Founding Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. In 2002 he received the Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering and was elected to the Board of Directors of AIChE. In 2003, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

    Professor Stephanopoulos has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in the chemical engineering curriculum at Caltech and MIT. He has also developed a number of new classes including Metabolic Engineering, Metabolic and Cell Engineering and, more recently, Bioinformatics. He has co-authored the first textbook on the subject of Metabolic Engineering and participated in the teaching of a number of biotechnology courses in the MIT summer sessions since 1985. He introduced and directed two such courses on the subjects of Metabolic Engineering (1995-99) and Bioinformatics (2000-).