We focus on the environmental effects on the catabolic and anabolic fluxes within the cell with respect to energy conservation.
Microbial cells are free-living and generally unicellular.
As a consequence, for survival, they must adapt to a wide variety of growth environments and therefore have an extensive capacity to change themselves both structurally and functionally. This can be developed for man's advantage. Stable mutants in which the chromosomal aceF gene encodes for lipoate transferase with a different number of lipoyl domains have been constructed and we have demonstrated that as the number of lipoyl domains diverges from three the efficiency of growth is lower and the carbon flux to acetate changes. These results are important for commercial systems using E. coli as the host for heterologous gene production. E. Dave, J.R. Guest and M.M. Attwood.