RESEARCH TOPICS  for the Graduate Students           

The Çalık Research Group is a creative Lab at the forefront of biochemical reaction engineering and biocatalysis (through metabolic engineering in cells) for the production of high-value therapeutic proteins (for the pharmaceutical sectors) and intermediate biomolecules as novel reactants (for chemical industries). We develop green-and-clean processes with low-entropy features and prioritize integrity and safety in our research.

Research in Çalık’s Lab (2025-2026 Spring Semester) 

The six main research lines in Professor Çalık’s Lab:

Engineering at molecular- and micro- scales: Lines 1-3

(1) Design and construction of hybrid-architectured de novo synthetic promoters to activate targeted intracellular reaction pathway(s)

(2) Transcriptional engineering in cells for the overexpression of master transcription factor(s) to decrease the pressure on the transcriptional machinery

(3) Design and assembly of de novo intracellular reaction pathway(s) for biomolecule synthesis

Engineering at mesoscale (pilot-scale): Line 4

(4) Analysis and design of bioreactor operation conditions for bioreactor design

Computational methodologies for biochemical reaction engineering: Lines 5 and 6

(5) Genome-scale (GEMs) and biochemical-reactions-based model construction and analysis

(6) Prediction of master transcription factors and binding sites for designing synthetic promoter architectures

Collaborating with:

Professor Jianguo Zhang (University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, School of Health Science and Engineering)

Professor Tunçer H Özdamar (Ankara University, Dept of Chemical Engineering)

Associate Professor Aybar Acar  (METU, Institute of Bioinformatics)