What's the flux? Measuring and Modeling Microbial Metabolism

Metabolism, the flow of mass and energy through the cellular reaction network, is of fundamental importance to all biologically produced compounds, and yet metabolic modeling and measurement techniques are generally applied as afterthoughts in many successful metabolic engineering projects. In my talk, I will discuss the challenges to "industrializing" the analysis of metabolic fluxes as well as the many opportunities in this field. I will give an overview of several competing modeling frameworks for describing metabolism and use a recently published case study of a current leading paradigm. The usefulness and limitations of "direct" metabolic measurements will also be described.

Speaker: Adam Meadows has been building computational models of cellular metabolism for the last decade or so. He is currently employed at Amyris where he was the founding member of the company's Computational Biology department. Prior to joining Amyris, he completed a post-doc at Genentech where he explored the use of metabolic modeling tools for process and strain improvement. Adam holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California – Berkeley and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University.

For details and to RSVP see the BayBIFX page

Room 112