Systems Biology of Metabolism: Uncovering Regulatory & Protein Structure Networks

Biological networks of the integrated functions of genes and proteins in cells is of fundamental and immediate importance to the emerging field of systems biology, and represents a powerful means for integrating biological data to aid in understanding emergent properties of biological systems. Systems biology techniques are increasingly being used to build organism specific metabolic networks. We will discuss the construction of genome-scale integrated regulatory-metabolic network for S. cerevisiae. We will highlight cofactor balancing and gene knockout strategies for strain design leading to the microbial overproduction of targeted compounds including chemicals identified as promising biofuels. Moreover, Metabolic Flux Analysis (MFA) aims to measure the in vivo reaction rates for an organism metabolic network. 13C MFA is being used to measure intracellular metabolic flux using proteogenic amino acids and peptides for microbial metabolism.
Many biochemical processes are initiated by specific molecular association and are important to transfer energy or information. Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRSs) are an important class of enzymes involved in information-processing. In addition, we will see how dynamic structural networks are constructed to understand long range signaling of protein tRNA complex.