The central theme of Koffas' research is metabolic engineering of unicellular organisms with the purpose of efficiently producing high value chemicals, such as nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals, and proteins of therapeutic importance. Within this context, several different approaches are applied, including 1) development of computational tools to enable the prediction of genetic modifications that would result in increasing the flux in a pathway of interest; 2) protein engineering to allow the functional expression of eukaryotic enzymes in simple microorganisms; and 3) identification of previously unknown metabolic enzymes, with emphasis on enzymes involved in targeted hydroxylations and glycosylations; (4) development of metabolic switches for the dynamic control of metabolic fluxes, based on the concentration of intracellular metabolites
