Assb17/PathTox

Pathway toxicity

Compound toxicity is a limiting factor in many industrial biotechnology applications from metabolic engineering to drug design, becoming a major concern for developing cost-efficient production in cell factories as high production yields are often limited by toxic intermediates or through accumulation of byproducts.

To address this critical issue we will use a structure-activity model for toxicity to rank our pathways. The toxicity predictions can be used for fine-tuning heterologous expression into a computational-framework for metabolic pathway design.

The Ecolitox server

Ecolitox is a web-server based predictor of metabolite toxicity in E. coli. It has been developed based on experimental data from inhibition assays. The server predicts toxicity of a given metabolite based on its chemical structure. In a metabolic engineering project, Ecolitox is useful as it allows us to consider toxicity of pathway intermediates and to select the less-toxic pathway.