Making Fuel and Drug-Producing Microbes through Analysis, Modeling and Design

Speaker: Desmond Lun, Ph.D.Abstract:Engineering microorganisms that efficiently produce drugs and fuels is an exciting and challenging problem
with large potential impact on energy supply, the environment, and global health. Such engineering is greatly
aided by systematic design and, in this talk, we discuss how systematic design can be achieved through the
analysis and modeling of microbial metabolic networks. We discuss approaches that we are developing for
modeling metabolism and gene regulation and for using these models to guide design. In particular, we
describe a network optimization problem that arises in the context of optimal design and discuss algorithmic
approaches for its solution. We describe our progress in engineering E. coli for petroleum production from
simple sugars and in other engineering directions.Biography:Desmond Lun is a Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Research Fellow in
Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Prior to his present position, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in
the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received bachelor's
degrees in mathematics and computer engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2001, and
S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2002 and 2006,
respectively. Dr. Lun's research interests are in synthetic biology, systems biology, and networking. He is coauthor,
with Tracey Ho, of "Network Coding: An Introduction," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.Host: Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia Veal