What Drugs and Chemicals Do to Our Bugs?

double feature BIOENGINEERING SEMINAR

(see details of 2nd talk HERE)

Abstract:
We are exposed to hundreds – if not thousands – of various small molecule chemicals through our food. These include therapeutic drugs but also chemical pollutants such as pesticides and industrial chemicals that make their way into food systems. I will discuss interactions between these xenobiotics with our gut microbiome, which sits at the interface of environment and our vital organs, mechanistic basis of these interactions, and potential routes to detoxification.

Bio:
Kiran R. Patil studied Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (Mumbai, India). He moved to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) to work with Prof. Jens Nielsen and obtained his PhD in Systems Biology. Kiran was then appointed as Assistant Professor at DTU where he worked on transcriptional regulation and metabolic engineering. In 2010, Kiran joined the Structural and Computational Biology Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-Heidelberg, Germany). He was appointed Director of Research at the MRC Toxicology Unit in 2019, and appointed as Professor of Molecular Systems Biology in October 2022.