Metabolic footprinting in microbiology: methods and applications in functional genomics and biotechnology
Journal article, 2008

Metabolomics embraces several strategies that aim to quantify cell metabolites in order to increase our understanding of how metabolite levels and interactions influence phenotypes. Metabolic footprinting represents a niche within metabolomics, because it focuses on the analysis of extracellular metabolites. Although metabolic footprinting represents only a fraction of the entire metabolome, it provides important information for functional genomics and strain characterization, and it can also provide scientists with a key understanding of cell communication mechanisms, metabolic engineering and industrial biotechnological processes. Due to the tight and convoluted relationship between intracellular metabolism and metabolic footprinting, metabolic footprinting can provide precious information about the intracellular metabolic status. Hereby, we state that integrative information from metabolic footprinting can assist in further interpretation of metabolic networks.

Author

Valeria Mapelli

Lisbeth Olsson

Chalmers, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Industrial biotechnology

Jens B Nielsen

Chalmers, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Life Sciences

Trends in Biotechnology

Vol. 26 9 490-497

Subject Categories

Industrial Biotechnology

Areas of Advance

Life Science Engineering (2010-2018)

More information

Created

10/8/2017