Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, and Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, 200 College Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E5, Canada.
Nat Rev Microbiol. 2011 Jan;9(1):39-50. doi: 10.1038/nrmicro2456. Epub 2010 Dec 6.
There is a wide diversity of unexplored metabolism encoded in the genomes of microorganisms that have an important environmental role. Genome-scale metabolic modelling enables the individual reactions that are encoded in annotated genomes to be organized into a coherent whole, which can then be used to predict metabolic fluxes that will optimize cell function under a range of conditions. In this Review, we summarize a series of studies in which genome-scale metabolic modelling of Geobacter spp. has resulted in an in-depth understanding of their central metabolism and ecology. A similar iterative modelling and experimental approach could accelerate elucidation of the physiology and ecology of other microorganisms inhabiting a diversity of environments, and could guide optimization of the practical applications of these species.
在具有重要环境作用的微生物的基因组中，存在着广泛的未被探索的代谢物。基因组规模的代谢建模使注释基因组中编码的单个反应能够组织成一个连贯的整体，然后可以用来预测在一系列条件下优化细胞功能的代谢通量。在这篇综述中，我们总结了一系列关于 Geobacter spp. 的基因组规模代谢建模的研究，这些研究深入了解了它们的中心代谢和生态学。类似的迭代建模和实验方法可以加速阐明栖息在各种环境中的其他微生物的生理学和生态学，并可以指导这些物种的实际应用的优化。
