Cellular metabolism

Metabolism fuels the activity of most cellular functions, playing a major role in the onset and treatment of disease. We study cellular metabolism across scales, from single reactions to pathways and all the way up to genome-scale metabolic processes. Our general aim is to develop computational methods to make sense out of metabolic data. We apply our methods in basic science as well as cutting-edge synthetic biology and healthcare technologies.

A key novelty of our approach is that we model the interaction between metabolism and other components of the cellular machinery like signalling and gene regulation. Some of our current work in this area:

• Optimality principles to explain the temporal coordination of metabolism. We use ideas from optimal control theory and linear programming applied to dynamic models of metabolic networks.

• Stochasticity in metabolism. We use stochastic analysis and simulation to predict the impact of molecular noise in metabolic heterogeneity and phenotypic variation.

• Control of metabolic pathways. We employ nonlinear dynamics, control theory and multiobjective optimization to study genetic regulation of metabolism.