The Trinh research lab seeks to fundamentally understand and engineer cellular
metabolism with the ultimate goal to design, construct, and characterize cells with
optimized metabolic functionalities. These engineered cells are utilized as efficient and
robust whole-cell biocatalysts exhibiting only desirable properties specifically tailored
for biotechnological applications related to health, energy, and environment. To pursue
the goal, our research group is interested in applying and developing both theoretical
and experimental tools in interdisciplinary areas of systems and synthetic biology
together with metabolic and biochemical engineering. 

Biofuels and Bioenergy

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Redesigning Escherichia coli metabolism for anaerobic production of isobutanol (with Jonhnny Li, Harvey Blanch, and Douglas Clark), Appl Environ Microbiol (2011)
 

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Elucidating Mechanisms of Solvent Toxicity in ethanologenic Escherichia coli (with Sarah Huffer, Melinda Clark, Harvey Blanch, and Douglas Clark), Biotechnol Bioeng (2010)
 

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A minimal Escherichia coli cell for most efficient ethanol production from hexoses and pentoses (with Pornkamol Unrean and Friedrich Srienc), Appl Environ Microbiol (2008)

To obtain an efficient ethanologenic E. coli strain we have reduced with 8 gene knockout...

 

Metabolic pathway analysis

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Parallelization of null space algorithm for the computation of metabolic pathways (with Dimitrije Jevremovic, Friedrich Srienc, Daniel Boley, and Carlos Sosa), Parallel Computing (2011)
 

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On Algebraic Properties of Extreme Pathways in Metabolic Networks (with Dimitrije Jevremovic and Daniel Boley), J Comp Biol (2010)
 

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Metabolic Pathway Analysis: A Useful Tool for Characterizing Cellular Metabolism (with Aaron P. Wlaschin and Friedrich Srienc), Appl Microbiol Biotechnol (2009)
 

Metabolic Engineering

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Design, construction, and performance of the most efficient biomass producing E. coli bacterium (with Ross P. Carlson, Aaron P. Wlaschin, and Friedrich Srienc), Metab Eng (2006)

Inverse metabolic engineering based on elementary mode analysis was applied to maximize the biomass yield...

 

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The fractional contributions of elementary modes to the metabolism of E. coli and their estimation from reaction entropies (with Aaron P. Wlaschin, Ross P. Carlson, and Friedrich Srienc), Metab Eng (2006)

The metabolism of a cell can be viewed as a weighted sum of elementary modes....