The MITCNC Life Sciences Forum is pleased to present Dr. Peter Karp. Please join us as Dr. Karp gives an overview of his cutting-edge work in bioinformatics which forms the basis for biofuel design to pharmaceutical drug development.

Peter D. Karp is director of the Bioinformatics Research Group within the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. Dr. Karp has authored more than 90 publications in bioinformatics and computer science. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1989, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information..

Although the human genome has received most of the press, to date the genomes of more than 500 bacteria have been sequenced. These organisms include many important bacterial pathogens, and potential metabolic engineering hosts for biofuels efforts. The metabolic network is a biochemical factory encoded by the genome of every organism, and knowledge of the metabolic network can aid scientists in designing new drugs against pathogens, and in engineering increased biofuels production from other bacteria.

This talk will describe a 15-year effort by my group in developing software and databases for metabolic pathway information. The talk will describe algorithms for predicting the metabolic network of an organism from its sequenced genome, which we have applied to 370 genomes and made available through the BioCyc.org Web site. We have developed a hierarchical graph layout algorithm for visualizing complete metabolic networks, as well as an algorithm for predicting anti-microbial drug targets.

Thank you to Google, Inc for graciously hosting this event.