Metabolomics and Fluxomics of Clostridium acetobutylicum Part 1: Systems-Level Kinetic Flux Profiling Elucidates a Complete TCA Cycle

Project Goals (Abstracts 97-99): Microbial biofuel (i.e. hydrogen and butanol) production holds great promise as a source of renewable clean energy. A critical step towards more efficient biofuel production is improved understanding of the regulation of biofuel-related metabolism and the development of models that are sufficiently accurate to enable rational control of the network behavior. With the long term aim of enabling such control, we propose to develop integrated experimental-computational technologies for quantitative dissection of microbial biofuel-producing metabolism. These tools will be broadly applicable to many microbial biofuel producers. We plan to illustrate them with the organism Clostridium acetobutylicum.