Mohammad Mazharul islam

Hi, welcome to my page!

I am a PhD candidate in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department at UNL. Prior to joining UNL, I earned my BS in Chemical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and my MS in Chemical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. 

During my PhD research in the Systems and Synthetic Biology laboratory, I established a foundation in metabolic model development and analysis, which is the rapidly advancing field in Systems Biology. Computations and modeling have emerged as an indispensable tool that drives the process of understanding, discovery, and redesign of biological systems. Nowadays, we use computations to reconstruct models of metabolism that account for stoichiometry, regulation, kinetics, and increasingly every macromolecular species present. These models provide a rich tapestry for computational tools to come up with engineering interventions directed to overproduction. The implementation of these interventions at the DNA, RNA, or enzymatic level relies on careful tuning by biophysical modeling frameworks.

My current projects involve 
i) Development and analysis of a systems-level pan-genome metabolic model for the analysis of Staphylococcus aureus physiology; 
ii) Understanding the effects of heat stress on rice seed development using optimization-based analysis of transcriptomic data; 
iii) Elucidating the role of viral auxiliary metabolic genes in modulating microbial interactions in the bovine rumen; and 
iv) Modeling the methane-recycling community metabolism in freshwater lakes.  

Outside of work, I like to spend my time gardening, fishing, photography, traveling, and handwritten correspondence.

Connect with me via LinkedIn, Researchgate, Google Scholar, or Facebook. 

Here is a list of my publications:

1. Islam, M. M., Schroeder, W., and R. Saha, “Kinetic Modeling of Metabolism: Present and Future”, , Current Opinion in Systems Biology, in Press, (2021).

2. Islam, M. M., J. K. Sandhu, H. Walia, and R. Saha, “Transcriptomic data-driven discovery of global regulatory features in developing rice seeds under heat stress”, Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 18:2556-2567 (2020).

3. Islam, M. M., Le, T., Daggumati, S. R., and Saha, R., "Investigation of microbial community interactions between lake Washington methanotrophs using genome-scale metabolic modeling", PeerJ, 8:e9464, (2020).

4. Islam, M. M., Thomas, V. C., Van Beek, M., Ahn, J., Alqarzaee, A. A., Zhou, C., Fey, P. D., Bayles, K. W., and Saha, R., "An integrated computational and experimental study to elucidate Staphylococcus aureus metabolism", npj Systems Biology and Application 6:3 (202o).
5. Islam, M. M., Fernando, S. C., and Saha, R., "Metabolic Modeling Elucidates Metabolic Transactions in the Rumen Microbiome and the Metabolic Shifts upon virome Interactions",  Frontiers in Microbiology 10, 2412 (2019).
6. Islam, M. M., Al-Siyabi, A., Obata, T., and Saha, R., "Dissecting metabolic flux in C4 plants: experimental and theoretical approaches", Phytochemistry Reviews, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11101-018-9579-8 (2018).
7. Islam, M. M. and R. Saha, Computational Approaches on Stoichiometric and Kinetic Modeling for Efficient Strain Design. Methods Mol Biol. 1671: 63-82, (2018).
8. Zomorrodi, A. R., Islam, M. M. [author with equal contribution] and Maranas, C., (2014). "d-Optcom: dynamic multi-level and multi-objective metabolic modeling of microbial communities", ACS Synthetic Biology, 3: 4 (247-257), (2014).