Naturwissenschaftlich-Technischen Fakultät I der Universität des Saarlandes

The baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a simple eukaryotic organism with approximately 6000 genes. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an ideal model organism for large-scale functional studies and provides a system in which genes can be systematically inactivated by way of gene-knockout methods. A substantial fraction of the 6000 genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae encode proteins for which currently we do not know any confirmed or putative function. Prediction of the functional role of these proteins is a challenging problem in systems biology, especially as many of these genes have no overt phenotypes. In our study, we aim at a better understanding of the underlying functional relationships between genes working across diverse metabolic pathways using intracellular metabolite profiling studies. We applied bioinformatics methods and statistical analysis techniques in combination with metabolic profiling to understand the function and the regulatory mechanisms of specific genes involved in central carbon metabolism and amino acid biosynthesis. The experimental work was carried out by the group of Prof. Elmar Heinzle (Biochemical Engineering, Saarland University), our collaboration partner. 13 C stable isotope substrates can be used as tracers to generat