9812879 Sinskey The objective of this conference is to provide a consensus definition of the goals and principles of Metabolic Engineering. The first Engineering Foundation conference that emphasize Metabolic Engineering was entitled "Recombinant DNA Biotechnology: Focus on Metabolic Engineering" and was held from October 6-11, 1996, in Danvers, MA. An international group of chemical engineers, computational scientists, molecular biologists and biochemists met to address a number of important issues regarding the emergence of the field of metabolic engineering. The conference was very well attended by an international group representing industry, academia and government. The organizing committee recommended that a second conference entitled Metabolic Engineering II (ME II) be held in Europe two years later. ME II is scheduled for October 25-30, 1998, at Schloss Elmau/Oberbayern (Bavaria), Germany. A key objective of ME II will be an attempt to clarify the main differences of metabolic engineering from other established fields and also to provide the unique perspectives which are explored by this new area of research. An important aspect here is understanding the factors and mechanisms contributing to the control of flux through metabolic pathways. Specifically, sessions on the following topics have been planed: (1) experimental and computational tools, (2) metabolic engineering for production of pharmaceuticals, fuels and chemicals, (3) use of metabolic engineering in the synthesis of materials, (4) metabolic engineering in plant systems, (5) role of metabolic engineering in the production of proteins, (6) evolutionary strategies for strain improvement via metabolic engineering, (7) medical applications and gene therapy, (8) higher-level metabolic engineering through regulatory genes, (9) use of metabolic engineering for environmental problems, and (10) future directions. ***
