Pranas Grigaitis

The function of cells is driven by their metabolic networks. Metabolic networks show remarkable plasticity in order to adapt to different biochemical and ecological contexts. This leads to vast diversity and complexity of metabolic strategies that living organisms undertake. Moreover, natural living systems are heavily intertwined: many organisms exhibit (inter-)dependences on other lifeforms (for instance, function of gut microbiome is indispensible in some aspects to humans). There has been a lot of recent progress in dissecting and understanding these metabolic architectures, and combined experimental- and theoretical studies have been indispensible to get a better grasp on the metabolic architectures we observe in Nature.

In the search for quantitative underpinnings of condition- and context-dependent metabolic strategies of different organisms, I blend computational models and experimental data to describe and make sense of their metabolic phenotypes. In my modeling efforts, I make extensive use of genome-scale metabolic models, the databases containing the information on metabolic capacity of the organism. Another pillar of my current research is multi-scale -omics data, which, combined, provide a very detailed snapshot of cell states, and can guide us in answering the questions “what does the cell do?”.

I am a post-doctoral researcher @Systems Biology Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am a biochemist by training, and, fascinated by the power that mathematics and computers bring to modern biology, I moved towards computational systems biology over the years. In early 2023, I have defended my PhD Thesis here at the Vrije Universiteit.