Science at the Shine Dome 2010
Symposium: Genomics and mathematics
Friday, 7 May 2009
Professor Lars Nielsen
Lars Nielsen heads the Systems and Synthetic Biology Group at the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. Using thermodynamic principles, novel approaches are developed for the rational design of complex pathways as well as handling complex, transient dynamics in developing tissue. A team of 50 people is using these novel approaches in the design of bioprocesses as diverse as the production of blood cells for transfusion and the production of industrial biopolymers.
Lars also heads the Metabolomics Australia Queensland Node, which is focused on assisting Australian scientists to develop flux modelling and analysis approaches for their biological systems of interest.
Constraint-based reconstruction and analysis of metabolic and regulatory networks
Implicit in the collection of high-throughput data is an assumption that computational models ultimately will facilitate biological discovery, reconciliation of heterogeneous data types, identify inconsistencies and enable the systematic generation of hypotheses. Current naïve statistical models fall well short of this ambition, while the use of the conventional dynamic models of physics suffers from our inability to accurately determine in vivo parameters. Constraint-based models use stoichiometry, thermodynamics, physical capacity constraints and regulation to define feasible solution spaces, which can then be explored using a range of tools to infer network behaviour. The framework has proven surprisingly powerful in its ability to predict the behaviour of natural as well as engineered networks.
