Associate Professor University of North Georgia Oakwood, Georgia
Body of Abstract: Metabolic reconstruction and modeling rapidly highlight genes missing from metabolic networks or genes that lack matching networks, and so can guide function discovery using comparative genomics approaches. These approaches exploit the wealth of prokaryotic and plant genomes, gene expression datasets, and other post-genomic resources to predict candidates for ‘missing’ genes and to join new genes to metabolic networks. Predicted functions can often be experimentally validated in prokaryote models, providing an efficient entry to understanding plant pathways. The concepts of metabolite damage and repair are new and at the frontier of metabolic research. Metabolite damage arises because enzymes in all organisms, although regarded as specific, in fact frequently make mistakes that lead to toxic damage products. Such products can also arise from spontaneous chemical side reactions of metabolites. Genetic and genomic evidence from prokaryotes and eukaryotes has implicated a network of conserved enzymes that repair damaged metabolites. Understanding damage and repair processes is foundational to interpreting and manipulating metabolism, and knowledge of such systems is very important for successful biotechnology applications.