Presented on July 10, 2012 from 8:30 a.m.-9:30 a.m. at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience (IBB), room 1128, Georgia Tech.Runtime: 51:22 minutesUnderstanding and controlling cellular metabolism (the process by which nutrients taken into a
cell are turned into energy and the building blocks for more cells) is crucial to numerous
applications, from enabling more efficient bioenergy production to unraveling the mechanisms of
diseases like cancer. However, true understanding of (and control over) metabolism is hindered
by a dearth of information available about the dynamics of metabolism and the molecular
mechanisms that regulate those dynamics. A deeper understanding in these areas would enable
much more efficient manipulation of existing metabolic networks to circumvent or exploit native
metabolic regulation. In this seminar, we will discuss our work as we begin to unravel metabolic
dynamics and regulation in two different (yet related) systems: yeast and cancer. Using mass
spectrometry, we investigate the metabolic dynamics of cancer cells in response to
environmental perturbations that we expect tumors to encounter in vivo. We also use
complementary high-throughput analytical techniques to begin to enumerate the space of
metabolite-protein interactions in the metabolic network of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae