Tuesday, 17th September, 2013, 16:30

Unfolding diversity: Modeling promiscuity and toxicity in the metabolic space and beyond.

The development of in silico whole-cell model organisms is helping to build the interface between high-throughput biological data and predictive biology. I will present the work of our group based on metabolic circuits to design and optimize biological devices for production, sensing and regulation [1], introducing proof-of-concept applications of such devices for smart therapeutics and synthetic biology. Our approach is formally described through graph balance analysis, providing a methodology that can be used to study diverse coupling mechanisms such as promiscuous interactions [2] or toxicity pathways [3]. The integration of pathway information with whole-cell models might ultimately unveil unexpected synergistic effects originated from system perturbations.

[1] Carbonell P., Planson A.G., Fichera D., Faulon J.L. A retrosynthetic biology approach to metabolic pathway design for therapeutic production. BMC Systems Biology, 5:122, 2011.

[2] Carbonell P., Faulon J.L., Molecular signatures-based prediction of enzyme promiscuity. Bioinformatics, 26(16):2012-2019, 2010.

[3] Planson A.G., Carbonell P., Paillard E., Pollet N., Faulon J.L. Compound toxicity screening and structure-activity relationship modeling in Escherichia coli. Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 109:846-850, 2012.

Speaker: Pablo Carbonell, Institute of Systems and Synthetic Biology (iSSB), Univ. Evry, CNRS, Evry, France.

Room Charles Darwin (PRBB)