Computational Tools for the Synthetic Biology of Natural Products

The engineering of microbial production systems for high-value natural products relies heavily on the availability of computational tools to assist all steps of the design–build–test cycle of synthetic biology. Recent developments include:

• New methods for the detection and analysis of biosynthetic gene clusters (antiSMASH, multiGeneBlast) and the identification of novel compounds (Pep2Path).
• Bespoke computational modelling approaches for metabolic networks to aid host cell optimization and pathway engineering (MultiMetEval, Uncertainty Modelling).
• Metabolomics analysis software for the evaluation and debugging of engineered microbes (MetAssign, mzMatch, mzMatch-ISO).

These tools are currently implemented as part of the design and engineering pipeline of the Manchester SYNBIOCHEM centre, and the talk will illustrate some of these applications.