Start
Oct 14, 2010 - 16:00
End
Oct 14, 2010 - 17:30
Venue
Creativity Hall (Room No. 118)
Event Type
Speaker
Dr. Rishi Jain Postdoctoral Scientist Biosciences Division Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Title
Biomedical and Bioenergy Application of Genome Scale Metabolic Analysis
Abstract: Sequencing of genomes is taking place at an ever growing pace that has led to genome-scale metabolic reconstructions of various organisms. Constraint-based flux balance analysis method is one of the ways of identifying the flux distribution in these genome-scale reconstructions. In this talk I am going to specifically focus on two of the applications of this methodology that I have been involved in. The first is a biomedical application to study the effects of viral infection on host metabolism. Escherichia coli/MS2 was used as the host-pathogen model system. Coupling experimental studies with modeling strategies predictions were made showing upregulation of certain pathways and downregualtion of other pathways. This illustrates the potential of using this methodology to identify drug targets. The second application applies to the biofuels area. Here I developed a heuristic approach to optimize biohydrogen production in Escherichia coli. Six mutations were predicted to increase hydrogen production. Experiments have shown qualitative agreement suggesting the potential for use as a cellular design and engineering tool.