Jacky Snoep, professor at the Department of Biochemistry at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, will give a talk on Wednesday November 12 at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) campus entitled: Systems Biology of Biochemical Networks; using kinetic and structural models to predict functional behavior.Time: 11.15 - 12.00
Place: Håkonshallen, Dept. of Animal and Aquacultural Sciences (IHA), UMB
DNA is often described as the blueprint of an organism, and the ultimate predictive model would be the one that takes a DNA sequence as input and has the species' behavior as output. Whereas an architect would be able to make a 3-D representation of a building from its blueprint, there is no way we can do this for biological species from a DNA sequence. The best we can do at present is to construct stoichiometric models of the reaction network of a cell. Especially for metabolic processes such reconstructions have been made to a relatively high degree of completeness for several species. On the basis of such structural models and additional constraints some interesting predictions can be made about steady state flux relations in such models. However to predict functional behavior of networks often some information on the kinetics of the reaction network is essential. One approach is to use random kinetics and test whether some generic behavior can be distilled from the combined structural and kinetic model. For smaller metabolic systems detailed kinetic models exist and these can be applied for the design of metabolic engineering strategies. Lastly, when full kinetic information is available one can make predictions for new regulatory interactions. Using models (ranging from purely structural to the detailed kinetic type) of bacteria, yeast and human we will give examples of the predictive power in both fundamental and applied projects.
