Global Reconstruction of the Human Metabolic Network
Wednesday, October 17
Technological Institute, Lecture Room 2
Lecture 4:30 p.m.
Reception to follow in the Jerome B. Cohen Commons
Free parking is available after 4 p.m. in the F parking lot on the west side of Sheridan Road across from the Technological Institute.

New “Dimensions” in Genome Annotation
Thursday, October 18
Technological Institute, Lecture Room 5
Refreshments 3:45 p.m.
Lecture 4 p.m.

Global Reconstruction of the Human Metabolic Network

Metabolism is a vital cellular process, and its malfunction is a major contributor to human disease. Metabolic networks are complex and highly interconnected, and thus systems-level computational approaches are required to elucidate and understand metabolic genotype–phenotype relationships. Palsson’s laboratory has manually reconstructed the global human metabolic network based on Build 35 of the genome annotation and a comprehensive evaluation of more than 50 years of legacy data (i.e., bibliomic data). This lecture describes the reconstruction process and demonstrates how the resulting genome-scale (or global) network can be used for the discovery of missing information, for the formulation of an in silico model, and as a structured context for analyzing high-throughput biological data sets. These results highlight some of the applications enabled by the reconstructed human metabolic network. The establishment of this network represents an important step toward genome-scale human systems biology.

New "Dimensions" in Genome Annotation

Traditional genome annotation involves the enumeration of open reading frames and their functional assignment. Currently there are ongoing efforts to identify all the interactions between these components. The resulting map of interactions effectively represents a 2D annotation. It takes the form of a stoichiometric matrix if the interactions are described with chemical equations. This lecture details the formulation and properties of this matrix and how it can be used as the basis for computing allowable phenotypic functions. The issues associated with the packing of the bacterial genome and the function of the interaction map in 3D are also discussed. Finally, the lecture addresses the issue of genomes changing in space and time (4D) through adaptive evolution and describes the full resequencing of bacterial genomes to map all genetic changes that occur during adaptation.