Prøveforelesning og disputas - MSc in biology Roland Sauter

Later, at 12.15 he will defend his thesis entitled: "Metabolites at Genome-Scale: Towards Genome-Scale Modeling Strategies for Metabolite Concentrations"

Professor Nigel Yoccoz at AMB will lead the disputation.

Popular Science Summary
Collecting gene expression data has become cheap and easy. This tells us which genes are how active. But when we predict biochemistry, the concentrations of metabolites (small chemicals) inside cells matter too. For large models of biochemistry, these concentrations are difficult to use in models. As models grow, they need to balance how detailed they are with how easy they are to make and work with. We improved a common type of large models by selectively including critical metabolite levels as inputs - those of the cofactor NAD. We also developed a method that lets us easily predict metabolite levels, which are difficult to measure, from the more easily obtainable gene expression. This can be used in medical research, to search for metabolites that could indicate certain diseases, or to get an overview of the effects of diseases, or medical treatment, in humans. We used all of these to analyze what happens in human biochemistry when we lose NAD as we age.

Evaluation Committee

• Professor Eivind Almaas, NTNU (1. opponent)
• Associate Professor Anna Matuszynska, University of Achen, Germany (2. opponent)
• Associate Professor John Beck Jensen, AMB (Internal member and leader of the committee)

Supervisors

• Professor Ines Heiland, Department of Arctic and Marine Biology
• Professor Hilde Hansen, Department of Chemistry, NT Faculty
• Dr Sascha Schäuble, The Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology – Hans Knöll Institute, Germany

Streaming

Both the trial lecture and defense and will be streamed and recorded:

• Trial lecture
• Defense

Thesis

 The thesis is available through Najonalt vitenarkiv