Welcome to my home page! I’m a postdoc at UCLA, working in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Department of Human Genetics.

I am a chemical engineer by training, and am interested in systems biology and metabolic engineering. I graduated my Ph. D. in 2004, from Iowa State University. There, I worked in the lab of Jackie Shanks, focusing on the application of stable isotope labeling, NMR and metabolic network modeling to quantify compartmented metabolic fluxes in plants. Currently, I work on metabolic investigations of glycerol kinase deficiency, an inherited human disease, in the labs of Katrina Dipple and Jim Liao.

These are some selected publications:

Sriram G, Iyer VV, Fulton DB, Shanks JV (In press, expected 2007) Identification of hexose hydrolysis products in metabolic flux analytes: A case study of levulinic acid in plant protein hydrolysate. Metabolic Engineering. [Accepted manuscript]

Sriram G, Fulton DB, Shanks JV (2007). Flux quantification in central carbon metabolism of Catharanthus roseus hairy roots by ¹³C labeling and comprehensive bondomer balancing. Phytochemistry 68: 2243-2257. [DOI] [PubMed]

Iyer VV, Sriram G, Shanks JV (2007). Metabolic flux quantification of central carbon metabolism in plant systems. In: Nikolau BJ, Wurtele ES (Eds) Concepts in Plant Metabolomics. Springer. [DOI] [Amazon]

^§Sriram G, ^§González-Rivera O, Shanks JV (2006). Determination of biomass composition of Catharanthus roseus hairy roots for metabolic flux analysis. Biotechnology Progress 22: 1659-1663. [DOI] [PubMed] (^§Contributed equally.)

Sriram G, Martinez JA, McCabe ERB, Liao JC, Dipple KM (2005). Single-gene disorders: What role could moonlighting enzymes play? American Journal of Human Genetics 76: 911-924. [DOI] [PubMed]

Sriram G, Fulton DB, Iyer VV, Peterson JM, Zhou R, Westgate ME, Spalding MH, Shanks JV (2004). Quantification of compartmented metabolic fluxes in developing soybean embryos by employing biosynthetically directed fractional ¹³C labeling, two-dimensional [¹³C, ¹H] nuclear magnetic resonance, and comprehensive isotopomer balancing. Plant Physiology 136: 3043-3057. [DOI] [PubMed]

Sriram G, Shanks JV (2004). Improvements in metabolic flux analysis using carbon bond labeling experiments: bondomer balancing and Boolean function mapping. Metabolic Engineering 6: 116-132. [DOI] [PubMed]

Click here for my Curriculum Vita and contact information (144 KB PDF).

During my spare time you’ll find me occupied with some of the following.

Carnatic Music. Indian classical music in the South Indian style. This is a melodic musical style with rich scalar and rhythmic variety, as well as much potential for improvisation. See Carnatica or Medieval.org for more information. My favorite musician is DK Pattammal.

Wikipedia. A free encyclopedia in many languages, which anyone can edit. I think this is a wonderful thing that happened to the internet.

Transportation. Airline operations and railway networks fascinate me. Here is a link to Airliners.net, an aviation discussion forum, and here is a link to the IRFCA (Indian Railway mailing list and Fan Club Association) website.

Astronomy and astrophysics. I pursue astronomy and astrophysics as a hobby. Here are a couple of NASA pages that I find useful and fun: Ask an Astrophysicist, Astronomy Picture of the Day.