394531 event 1428483250 1492118371 "Finding a Needle in a Haystack: Parsing Large-scale Data to Define Regulatory Networks for Strain Engineering"

Lydia María Contreras
Assistant Professor
Chevron Centennial Teaching Fellow in Chemical Engineering McKetta
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Texas at Austin

Two important questions in strain engineering are: how to search the genome for targets that regulate a phenotype of interest? and, (ii) how to achieve controllable and even predictable coordination between endogenous and stress-inducing heterologous pathways? Although a large number of “omics” approaches are being attempted to address these questions, it is unclear how to interpret this massive amount of data in the context of biological pathways and utilize it to uncover underlying biological mechanisms for strain engineering. This seminar will address characterization tools that we are developing to automate the identification of global regulators that could be exploited in strain engineering. Specifically, we will present a general pipeline for engineering desirable complex phenotypes based on a rational and predictive systems analysis of global regulation and on the intracellular assaying of relevant targets. Our approach has combined bioinformatics, biophysical models and synthetic biology tools for prediction of pathways of interest in microbial organisms with extremophilic traits.

]]> Petit Institute seminars are held throughout the year and are open to all faculty, students and staff.

]]> Mark Styczynski, Ph.D. - faculty host

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