The Future of Biotechnology

Abstract

Rational cell engineering aims to increase the quality and quantity of the manufactured products by developing improved cell lines. Previously the selection for improvements has been carried out on a trial and error basis: cells that produced high levels of the desired product were positively selected and kept, while low–producing lines were discarded. Little or no understanding of the underlying biological and molecular processes was applied in this selection. However, with the increasing availability of new tools a more informed process is now possible. Most of these tools developed in the past decade aim to understand the biological make–up of cells by employing high–throughput (HT) approaches. For example, the HT of DNA sequencing allows the analysis of the genome of a specific cell line (genomics), RNA microarrays give information about the different types of mRNAs in a cell (transcriptomics), HT analysis of the entire protein contents shows the individual protein species present in the cell (proteomics). The information that these –omics approaches provide can be very useful for a detailed understanding of the cell factories and hence their improvement for the manufacturing of desired products.