About the Lab

Mahadevan lab uses modern techniques in systems and synthetic biology to understand and engineer organisms to solve global issues. Our key research interests are:

    1. Metabolic engineering

We aim to develop new pathways to produce important platform and commercially relevant chemicals.

    2. Systems biology

Our work is aimed at developing new models to aid our engineering designs. We aim to go beyond the stoichiometric approaches to metabolic models and focus on incorporating additional cellular processes such as transcription, translation and their associated dynamics.

    3. Synthetic biology-based dynamic control for Metabolic Engineering

Synthetic biology is undoubtedly a critical component of metabolic engineering, thus, we are developing new tools in this space to increase the efficiency of strain design and construction. We aim to develop new tools in synthetic biology to enable dynamic control of gene expression and improve modularity of synthetic circuits.

    4. Whole Body Models of Human Metabolism for Biomedical Engineering

In addition, our lab is developing multi-scale models of metabolism in order to capture the dynamics of whole body metabolism and using these models to analyze metabolic disorders (e.g. diabetes, effects of alcohol, cancer).

The potential for this approach for design and discovery of biological processes is reflected in the diversity of the research projects in the group ranging from microbial fuel cells, biofuels, biochemicals, bioremediation and the analysis of metabolic interactions in human brain, cancer and diabetes, where we bring to bear the group’s expertise in modeling and analysis of metabolism on designing innovative solutions for these outstanding challenges.