Diego Oyarzún
Dept of Mathematics
Imperial Colleague London
England
Cell survival depends on the interaction between biochemical networks that sense, transmit and process environmental cues. In particular, the interplay between metabolism and gene regulatory networks allows cells to switch on or off specific pathways in response to changing environmental conditions. This control strategy typically appears in the form of feedback loops where key regulatory metabolites up- or down-regulate enzyme expression. In this talk I will present some of my work on the analysis and design of coupled genetic-metabolic networks. I will briefly describe our use optimal control and hybrid systems theory to predict metabolic phenotypes and to design of genetic feedback circuits for metabolic engineering. The rest of the talk will be devoted to recent results on the propagation of stochastic fluctuations between gene expression and metabolic products, providing new insights on the role of biochemical noise in modulating metabolic phenotypes across bacterial populations.
Diego Oyarzún holds a Junior Research Fellowship in Biomathematics at the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London. More information in http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/d.oyarzun