Information produced by the annotation of an 'average bacterial genome' can be separated into three parts. One-third represents what we know, another third what we think we know, and the last third what we know we do not know. Knowledge of metabolism is also described by this three thirds rule. Understanding how a cell operates will require a better knowledge of the two ignored thirds of its parts. Moreover, metabolism needs to be further investigated using organisms whose life styles are different from those of model organisms. In this short review, we present Acinetobacter baylyi ADP1 as an environmental model especially suitable for large-scale genetic manipulation. Resources have been constructed in the past few years that can form the basis for diverse metabolic studies: the genome sequence, a single gene mutant collection, and a genome-scale metabolic model.