Sisbi: Software to Aid the Industrial Biotechnology Decision Process

The recent advances in the field of Metabolic Engineering (ME), regarding the optimization of microbes as cell factories, capable of producing compounds of high economic interest, have made this field one of the main providers of solutions for some of the main challenges faced by Industrial Biotechnology. Among other important contributions, some can be highlighted including strain optimization through the determination of suitable genetic changes, the optimization of culture medium conditions, the selection of suitable host microbes or the search for the most adequate pathways for the production of specific compounds through the insertion of heterologous pathways. In a previous project, the proponent consortium developed computational systems to address these and other ME tasks, creating an integrated platform for the selection and computational optimization of microbes seeking the production of added value compounds.

SISBI is a new project lead by SilicoLife seeking the development of an intelligent decision support system for Industrial Biotechnology (SISBI). This system promotes the development of innovative tools for the extraction and integration of knowledge, to provide an adequate support to reach important decisions in the context of Industrial Biotechnology, as it is the case of the selection of added value compounds, of adequate host microorganisms or of advantageous raw materials to be used in target bioprocesses.

SISBI will result in a knowledge hub including a set of knowledge extraction and integration modules, which will take into account diverse sources of available technical and economical data, boosted by powerful data and text mining tools capable of extracting knowledge from this raw information, useful knowledge for decision making.