Our research is focused on Metabolic Engineering - the improvement of cellular properties, using modern genetic tools. This field encompasses two important components: a) the modification of biochemical pathways inside cells and b) the rigorous evaluation of the resulting cellular phenotypes.
Our most recent research has been focussed on the following topics:
- Metabolic Engineering of E.Coli for the production of biochemicals.
- Inverse Metabolic Engineering
- Flux Determination
- Hepatocyte Physiology
- Systems Biology
To accomplish the above goals we make use of a diverse array of scientific tools and methods, many of which have also become areas of research for our group:
- Bioinformatics and Systems Biology - Our group was one of the first to realize the importance of computational tools for handling the large volume of data generated by microarrays and other technologies.
- Methods for intracellular flux determination - Fluxes are determined by material balancing, NMR fine spectra analysis and GC-MS measurements.
- DNA microarrays - We have developed full genome microarrays for Synechocystis Sp., and partial microarrays for C. glutamicum, E. coli, and the mouse genomes.
Bioreaction network analysis.