Journal of Biotechnology & Biomaterials
Open Access

Abstract

Obesity is an epidemic of the 21st century. It continues to expand in western countries and paradoxically even in the countries where poverty and malnutrition are major problems. No age group is exempted from obesity due to different reasons, i.e., diet, life style and genetic component among others. In this talk we describe how a computational model can be formulated to understand the mechanism of the development of ER stress and associated disorders on the onset of obesity. For this purpose, we collected extensively ER and ER stress related pathways information to construct a set of global pathways by including other related pathways, like apoptosis, diabetes, inflammation, protein degradation and obesity. With all these pathway database and literature, we design an integrated pathway, through mining strategies, to form a biochemical pathway related to ER stress and obesity. We find out the control points regulating the activity (i.e., ON or OFF through feedback inhibition) of the integrated pathway. We also find out the genes coding for the enzymes catalyzing the reactions in the pathway. The talk will also describe design of a database containing all this information. The pathways in the database will then be subjected to network analysis. We use flux balance analysis, control theory and machine learning methodology to develop the model of the pathway as well as to analyze the pathways/networks. The properties of the pathways/networks are very important from therapeutic point of view, as in simple terms, they have the power to control the whole system.

Biography

Rajat Kumar De is a Professor of Indian Statistical Institute, India. He has obtained his PhD degree from the same Institute in 2000. He was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute, Johns Hopkins University, USA, during 2002-2003. During the last 10-12 years, he has been working in the area of bioinformatics and in silico systems biology. Recently, he has started working on Big Data Analytics in the domain of bioinformatics and systems biology. He has published about 85 research papers in international journals, conference proceedings and edited books and co-edited two books.

Email: rajat@isical.ac.in