09 Dec 2019
17:00:00

BT Seminar Hall

5th IBSE Colloquium

We are happy to announce 5th IBSE Colloquium, by Prof. Radhakrishnan Mahadevan, Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto. The title of the talk is “Design Principles for Engineering Metabolism”. Radhakrishnan (Krishna) Mahadevan is a Professor in the Departments of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, and Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. He obtained his B. Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in Chemical Engineering in 1997 and then obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Delaware in Chemical Engineering in 2002. He was a research scientist at Genomatica Inc., San Diego from 2002–06 and has also held appointments as a visiting scholar and a guest lecturer at the Department of Bioengineering in the University of California, San Diego, and in the Department of Microbiology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests are in the area of modeling, analysis and optimization of metabolism for applications in bioremediation, biochemicals production and medicine and has published over 100 articles in these areas. He has received David W. Smith Jr. Best Paper Award in 2006, the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering in 2010, the Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology’s Young Investigator Award in 2012, University of Toronto FASE Research Leaders Award in 2013, the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2014, the Syncrude Innovation Award in 2014, and Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator award in 2017.

ABSTRACT

Bioprocess development for biofuels and biochemicals typically requires several rounds of metabolic engineering to meet process targets including product yield, titer and productivity, all of which impact the process economics. Advances in computational modeling techniques have allowed the development of genome-scale models of metabolism in several organisms. Such models have been the basis of several algorithms that often produce hundreds if not thousands of strain designs. Such a plethora of strain designs leads to the open question of prioritizing these designs for experimental implementation. In this talk, we present two different principles that could govern the implementation of such strain designs. First, we will introduce a complementary approach based on orthogonality of the production pathways to growth and examine how such an approach can facilitate the dynamic metabolic engineering of strains for metabolite production. In second part, we will describe methods for the identification of metabolite valves for the dynamic control of metabolism.