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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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In addition to its annual lectures, ChBE hosts a weekly seminar throughout the year with invited lecturers who are prominent in their fields. Unless otherwise noted, all seminars are held on Wednesdays in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building ("M" Building) in G011 (Cherry Logan Emerson Lecture Theater) at 4 p.m. Refreshments are served at 3:30 p.m. in the Emerson-Lewis Reception Salon.
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“Using Computations to Reconstruct, Analyze and Redirect Metabolism”
Costas Maranas, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Penn State University
Abstract:
Metabolism is defined as the full complement of chemical transformations in living systems. Systems biology techniques are increasingly being used to elucidate and quantify the full range of molecules (e.g., metabolite concentrations) and transformations (e.g., reaction fluxes) at play. In this talk, we will discuss how we can speed up the process of building and correcting organism-specific metabolic models using the recently developed MetRxn knowledgebase of standardized metabolite and reaction information. MetRxn is a standardized, non-redundant, searchable collection of published metabolic models and databases from a wide variety of organisms including atom mapping information across all reactions and enhanced integration with other databases. We will describe how this resource can impact genome-scale metabolic model reconstruction by providing curated reaction and metabolite content. Progress towards the rapid generation of microbial models, multi-tissue models for maize, and multi-organism models for microbial communities will be briefly highlighted. We will discuss how reaction atom mapping information in MetRxn can be used to construct isotope mapping models for metabolic flux elucidation, classify reactions and contrast pathways across organisms. Finally, we will present computational tools for strain optimization leading to the microbial overproduction of target biomolecules. Experimental results for a number of collaborative projects will be highlighted and the integration of kinetic information will be detailed.
