Cyanobacteria are an important group of photoautotrophic organisms that can synthesize valuable bio-products by harnessing solar energy. They are endowed with high photosynthetic efficiencies and diverse metabolic capabilities that confer the ability to convert solar energy into a variety of biofuels and their precursors. However, less well studied are the similarities and differences in metabolism of different species of cyanobacteria as they pertain to their suitability as microbial production chassis.

Here we assemble and update second of the two genome-scale models (the other is iCyt773 for Cyanothece sp. ATCC 51142) iSyn731 for Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 which contains 1,156 reactions and 996 metabolites. All reactions are elementally and charge balanced and localized into four different intracellular compartments (i.e., periplasm, cytosol, carboxysome and thylakoid lumen) and biomass descriptions are derived based on experimental measurements. Newly added reactions absent in earlier models (322) span most metabolic pathways with an emphasis on lipid biosynthesis. All thermodynamically infeasible loops are identified and eliminated from the model. Comparisons of model predictions against gene essentiality data reveal a specificity of 0.94 (94/100) and a sensitivity of 1 (19/19) for the Synechocystis iSyn731 model.

Related Publications:

Saha, R., Verseput, A.T., Berla, B.M., Mueller, T.J., Pakrasi, H.B. and Maranas, C.D. (2012), "Reconstruction and comparison of the metabolic potential of cyanobacteriaCyanothece sp. ATCC 51142 and Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803," PLoS ONE, 7(10):e48285.

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