title: Metabolic footprinting in microbiology: methods and applications in functional genomics and biotechnology.
abstract: Metabolomics embraces several strategies that aim to quantify cell metabolites in order to increase our understanding of how metabolite levels and interactions influence phenotypes. Metabolic footprinting represents a niche within metabolomics, because it focuses on the analysis of extracellular metabolites. Although metabolic footprinting represents only a fraction of the entire metabolome, it provides important information for functional genomics and strain characterization, and it can also provide scientists with a key understanding of cell communication mechanisms, metabolic engineering and industrial biotechnological processes. Due to the tight and convoluted relationship between intracellular metabolism and metabolic footprinting, metabolic footprinting can provide precious information about the intracellular metabolic status. Hereby, we state that integrative information from metabolic footprinting can assist in further interpretation of metabolic networks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden.
authors.forename: Valeria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Mapelli
authors.forename: Lisbeth
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Olsson
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nielsen
mesh_terms: D001698:Biomedical Engineering / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends; D001709:Biotechnology / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends*; D002450:Cell Communication / Q000502:physiology; D005110:Extracellular Space / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism*; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D008660:Metabolism / Q000502:physiology*