New insight into cellular metabolism from the use of mathematical models

Cells' metabolism is central to their ability to grow and divide. It ensures that nutrients are converted into energy and building blocks, e.g. amino acids, which can be used to synthesize proteins, DNA, lipids and the many other components that make up a living cell. The metabolism of cells has been mapped by detailed biochemical studies over the last 100 years, where the individual chemical reactions have been identified together with the enzymes that catalyze the individual reactions. We thus have an overview of all the many chemical reactions that take place in a cell, and in a yeast cell there are more than 4,000 chemical reactions associated with more than 1,100 proteins, while in human cells there are close to 13,000 identified reactions associated with close at 3,000 proteins. By using mathematical models, it is possible to collect all information about the metabolism of cells and thus study how the many different reactions affect each other. In the presentation, I will present how these models can be used in basic studies of cell metabolism, but they can also be used within biotechnology and human medicine.

Jens Nielsen

Jens Nielsen has an MSc degree in Chemical Engineering and a PhD degree (1989) in Biochemical Engineering from the Danish Technical University (DTU), and after that established his independent research group and was appointed full Professor there in 1998. He was Fulbright visiting professor at MIT in 1995-1996. At DTU he founded and directed Center for Microbial Biotechnology. In 2008 he was recruited as Professor and Director to Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, where he was directing a research group of more than 60 people. At Chalmers he established the Area of Advance Life Science Engineering, a cross departmental strategic research initiative and was founding Head of the Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, which encompassed more than 200 people. Jens Nielsen was a co-founder of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability that now has more than 300 people affiliated, for which he served as Chief Science Officer in the period 2013-2018. In 2019 Jens Nielsen was appointed as CEO of the BioInnovation Institute in Denmark, which is an institute financed with more than 500 MEUR from the Novo Nordisk Foundation with the objective to foster translational research and support new spin-out companies in life sciences. Jens Nielsen has supervised more than 160 PhD students and more than 110 post-doctoral researchers. He has published so far more than 900 publications that have been cited more than 138,000 times (current H-factor 169), and co-authored more than 40 books. He was identified as a highly cited researcher in 2015-2024. He is inventor of more than 50 patents and he has founded several biotech companies. He has received numerous Danish and international awards including the Nature Mentor Award, the ENI Award, the Eric and Sheila Samson Prime Minister Prize, the Novozymes Prize, and the Gold Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is member of several academies, including the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Science in USA, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology. He was a founding president of the International Metabolic Engineering Society and served as president in the period 2012-2021

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