T. Çakır; "Systems Biology of Metabolic Networks", March 12, 13:40

Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
FENS SEMINARS

Systems Biology of Metabolic Networks

Tunahan Çakır

Systems Biology is an emerging field which aims at systems-level understanding of biological systems by integrated analysis of cellular networks with high-throughput ‘omics’ data. In this talk, I will focus on metabolic networks as an example cellular network for systemic analysis. I will give examples on computational integration of transcriptomic and metabolomic data into metabolic pathways of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, from flux-based and graph-theory-based perspectives. The results will be discussed in terms of hierarchical information flow for the regulation of metabolism at different levels (transcriptional or metabolic). Later on, I will focus on a reverse engineering problem; prediction of network structure based solely on collected ‘omics’ data. Inference of underlying metabolic network topology using metabolome data will be illustrated by employing different statistical approaches. Effect of experimental design on results will also be addressed.

Short Biography

I have received my B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D degrees from Department of Chemical Engineering at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. My PhD thesis, entitled “Stoichiometric Models in Metabolic Systems Biology of Yeast” was partly a collaborative project with Center for Microbial Biotechnology at Technical University of Denmark. I was also involved in research on metabolic modeling of red blood cell and brain metabolisms during my PhD as a side work. My post-doctoral project at the Biosystems Data Analysis Group (University of Amsterdam) and at the Department of Metabolic and Endocrine Diseases (University Medical Center Utrecht) is supported by Netherlands Metabolomics Centre. Within this context, I work on a reverse engineering problem, where the inference of underlying metabolic network structure of selected microbial and mammalian systems is pursued by modeling in-silico-generated or lab-collected metabolome data.

March 12, 2008, 13:40, FASS 2119