Metabolic Engineering

The study of intracellular pathways in areas of biomedical and biotechnology.

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Metabolic Profiling

In this project, metabolic engineering will be applied to further our mechanistic understanding of diseases, such as Type II diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer diseases. The objective of this project is to quantify the pathway alterations in response to environmental mediators. Knowledge of in-vivo flux distributions in cells at different physiological states is of increasing importance by providing "cellular" targets for evaluation as predictors of the disease.

Investigators (PI is linked): Christina Chan
Categories: Metabolic Engineering, Biotechnology

Systems Biology

This is the study of biology as an integrated system of genetic, protein, metabolite, cellular, and pathway events that are continually changing and inter-related. Gene expression data provide information on pathways relevant to the metabolic models. Although genes yield informative clues to diseases, they do not contain functional information. Disease mechanisms can stem from genetic and environmental causes. The importance of studying biology as a system rather than one gene or protein at a time has become increasingly relevant with the advent of high throughput genomic and proteomic technologies. A systems approach can help explain why some genes respond to a particular environmental stimulus, while others do not.

Investigators (PI is linked): Christina Chan
http://www.egr.msu.edu/sysbio/  Categories: Metabolic Engineering, Biotechnology