Team:ETH Zurich/Project/Background

Current approaches

As usual when takling engineering projects, two main approaches can be followed: bottom-up and top-down.

In the first case we try to identify all the necessary functions for our system to work (in this case: to live). In this case we identify pathways to produce all necesary metabolites the cell needs, such as lipids, aminoacids, etc. A good example of this approach can be found in [].

The second approach starts from a working syspem (such as a well characterized strain like K12). By identifying non-essential parts of the metabolism and deleting them, we reduce the complexity of the cell.