Metabolic Pathways of Particular Relevance to Environmental Biotechnology

Metabolic Pathways of Particular Relevance to Environmental Biotechnology

Having established that the overall strategy of environmental biotechnology is to make use of the metabolic pathways in micro-organisms to break down or metabolise organic material. Metabolic pathways operating in the overall direction of synthesis are termed anabolic while those operating in the direction of breakdown or degradation are described as catabolic: the terms catabolism and anabolism being applied to describe the degradative or synthetic processes respectively.

 It has been mentioned already and it will become clear from the forthcoming discussion, that the eventual fate of the carbon skeletons of biological macromolecules is entry into the central metabolic pathways.