Reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic pathway in Aspergillus terreus NIH2624

Aspergillus terreus, a filamentous ascomycete is widely used for production of lovastatin. Lovastatin is a potential drug used in the treatment of cardio-vascular disease. In addition to lovastatin A. terreus produces co-metabolites such as geodin, sulochrin, etc. These co-metabolites increase the cost of downstream process by being similar. A. terreus is also involved in production of certain toxins such as patulin and citrinin responsible for toxicoses in humans and other animals. It also causes aspergillosis in the lungs. Reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic pathway in A. terreus provides information on reaction sets that can be modified to increase the required lovastatin and also by reducing the unnecessary co-metabolites formation. In addition it also enables researchers to identify suitable targets to gain knowledge on proteins that can be used as target for treating aspergillosis caused by Aspergillus spp. The reconstruction is done by using functional annotation, comparative metabolic genomics and enzyme data in A. terreus. By this methodology around 2561 genes has been assigned with metabolic data.