(607b) Systems Biotechnology for Understanding and Designing Microbial, Plant and Mammalian Cell Factories

The goals of process systems engineering are to better understand complex real systems and to effectively achieve desirable properties of the systems by exploiting and integrating statistical analysis, modeling, control and optimization techniques. Such systems approaches have been successfully applied to a variety of chemical processes. Recently, special attention has been paid to Systems Biotechnology to elucidate complex biological systems and improve/design their characteristics and properties towards biotechnological applications. The central task of this data- and model-driven research is to comprehensively collect, manage and analyze the global cellular information, i.e., high-throughput omics data, and to generate predictive computational models of the intricate biological processes, i.e., metabolic, signaling and regulatory networks. Thus, better understanding the cellular physiology, regulation and metabolism at the systems level and subsequently designing strategies for achieving desirable states using various systems analysis techniques are a prime target of this research. To this end, we have established core platform technologies and innovative methodological frameworks, developed computational models describing various microbial, plant and mammalian cells, and combined them systematically to characterize and engineer such cell factories towards the enhanced cellular properties. In this talk, several applications of the platform will be presented and current challenges and future direction in the field will be discussed.