Technology or method
Synthetic biology
Designing and building new biological parts, circuits and systems.
Emerging researchOpen in Biotech Lab
Metabolic engineering
Rewiring a microbe's chemistry to make useful molecules, such as a precursor of the antimalarial drug artemisinin in yeast.Source: Paddon et al., 2013
Also called artemisinin.
Technology or method
How Metabolic engineering connects
Metabolic engineering is an example of
Metabolic engineering uses
Molecule
Enzyme
A biological catalyst that speeds up a reaction without being used up. Most are proteins, but some RNAs are catalysts too, including the core of the ribosome.
Studied in
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
High-level semi-synthetic production of the potent antimalarial artemisinin (opens the original in a new tab)
Paddon CJ, Westfall PJ, Pitera DJ, et al. (2013). Nature 496:528-532.
Peer-reviewedPrimary research