Centennial Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
University of Delaware

ABSTRACT
“Towards a Holistic Understanding of Cellular Metabolism”

Measuring intracellular fluxes by 13C metabolic flux analysis (13C-MFA) has become a key activity in metabolic engineering, biotechnology and medicine. Here, I will present important new advances that have extended the scope of this technology to more complex biological systems, including dynamic, interacting, and evolving systems. One of the key 13C-MFA technical advances that was pioneered in our lab centers on the use of parallel labeling experiments for metabolic pathway discovery. In this presentation, I will describe several surprising new metabolic pathways that we have discovered in central carbon metabolism in microbes, including E. coli, as well as mammalian cells using this new powerful technology. These metabolic pathways have been ”hidden” from our view so far because they cannot be estimated using traditional experiments. Only through the use of carefully selected tracers and parallel labeling experiments are we able to visualize these pathways. Applications in cancer medicine, phermaceutical production, and synthetic biology will be discussed.