Oradora:   Susana Vinga, PhD

Investigadora Sénior do INESC-ID, grupo KDBIO Professora auxiliar convidada na Faculdade de Ciências Médicas - UNL

Abstract

Systems Biology is an emerging field that uses a global and integrative perspective to capture the behavior of complex living organisms. It is regarded as a crucial step in strengthening biology as a predictive science. The growing importance of this research is a reflection of its expected impact on several areas, such as food and pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology and medicine.

Recent advances in biology and biochemistry, along with the development of high-throughput techniques, are providing new experimental evidence to validate novel approaches to the reverse problem: identification of biological networks from experimental, time-dependent stimulus-response data. This topic poses challenging questions in the area of optimization and it is now recognized as a not straightforward problem

In this seminar a brief overview of the main open questions will be presented, including an introduction to systems biology and current strategies for the dynamic modeling of biochemical networks. A case-study on the reverse engineering of glycolysis in /Lactococcus lactis/ will be presented, where two distinct procedures were applied.

The results obtained have highlighted interesting features about the behavior of this ubiquitous pathway, that will be explored and discussed in future work.