Workshop on Complexity and systems biology of microbial biofuels.
Workshop programm (available in hardcopy at workshop)
Warwick Systems Biology Centre, Warwick University, UK.
Date: 20-24 June 2011.
Organisers: Nigel Burroughs (principal), Sam Bryan (principal), Conrad Mullineaux, Olaf Kruse
This workshop will examine the challenges in developing affordable efficient microbial biofuels (biohydrogen, biodiesel, bioethanol, higher carbon analogues) by bioprocessing of agricultural biproducts and production directly from sunlight by algae and photosynthetic bacteria. The challenges in engineering an organism capable of high fuel production are significant, with many techniques currently being applied including directed evolution, synthetic biology, bioengineering and metagenomic screening. The complex regulation of both metabolism and photosynthesis means that simply overexpressing key enzymes often fails, since control is distributed across the network. Extensive transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomic approaches are therefore needed to elucidate control and regulation processes. Further, questions still remain concerning enzyme compatibility and environmental tolerances, eg hydrogenase oxygen intolerance limits hydrogen production to essentially anaerobic conditions, although this remains contentious. Spatial or temporal compartmentalisation may thus be required to separate key processes which could possibly draw on examples in the emerging fields of spatial patterning and bacterial compartmentalization (e.g. carboxysomes). Further, reversion and loss of the biofuel/processing pathway is highly likely unless fitness is engineered to correlate with the end product. Systems biology, synthetic biology, metabolic networks and metabolic engineering are therefore essential disciplines in this enterprise. This workshop will take an interdisciplinary perspective on these problems, bringing together key biologists, bioprocess/bioengineers with systems biologists, bioinformaticians, biophysicists and modellers. Fundamental aspects of biological processes that underlie these challenges and key results in the area will be represented.
This workshop is part of the Mathematics of Complexity and Systems Biology symposium 2009-2011 kindly funded by EPSRC.
Speakers include:
Christoph Benning (Michigan), Don Bryant (Penn), Michelle Chang (Berkeley), Arvind Chavali (Virginia), Paul Dalby (UCL), Oliver Ebenhoeh (Aberdeen), Martin Hagemann (Rostock), Klaus Hellgardt (Imperial), Chris Herring (Mascoma), Patrik Jones (Turku), Stéphane Lemaire (CNRS, Paris), Krishnan Mahadevan (Toronto), Norio Murata (Okazaki), Clemens Posten (Karlsruhe), António Roldão (Chalmers), Alison Smith (Cambridge), Alexander Steinbüchel (Münster), Ralf Steuer (Manchester), Ed van Niel (Lund), Wim Vermaas (Arizona), Percival Zhang (Virginia).
Themes include:
Biofuels. Progress, possibilities etc.
Metabolic engineering and Synthetic biology.
Metabolism, modelling and optimisation
Systems Biology: Holistic and physiological aspects.
Key enzymes/complexes.
New and promising organisms/directions.
Workshop application.
If you would like to attend please contact Nigel Burroughs. A small number of places are earmarked for young researchers (PhD, first postdoc).
Costs. There is no registration fee. Lunches and morning/afternoon tea/coffee will be provided. Accomodation is available at about £50 per night in Radcliffe, a very nice hotel on campus. We may have some accomodation funds available which will be awarded on merit and date of application. The conference dinner will be £30-50.
