CAM colloquium - Friday, February 8
3:30 p.m.
655 Rhodes Hall

 

Joint with IGERT Program in Nonlinear Systems

 

Speaker: John J. Tyson, University Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg VA 24061 USA

Title: Regulation of the Eukaryotic Cell Cycle: From Molecular Networks to Cell Physiology

 

Abstract: The fundamental goal of molecular cell biology is to understand cell physiology in terms of the information encoded in the cell's genome. In principle, we know how this information is translated into functional proteins that carry out most of the interesting chores in a living cell. But to make a firm connection between molecular events and cell behavior involves many challenging problems in nonlinear dynamics and computational cell biology. A nice example is the cell cycle: the sequence of events by which a growing cell duplicates all its components and partitions them more-or-less evenly between two daughter cells. The molecular mechanism that controls DNA synthesis and nuclear division is so complex that its behavior cannot be understood by casual, hand waving arguments. By translating this mechanism into differential equations, we can analyze and simulate the behavior of the control system, comparing model predictions to the observed properties of cells. Bifurcation theory is an especially useful tool for understanding the 'signal-response' characteristics of dividing cells. This approach is generally applicable to any complex gene-protein network that regulates some behavior of a living cell.

References:
Tyson et al. (2001) Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 2:908-916.
Tyson et al. (2002) BioEssays 24:1095-1109.
Tyson et al. (2003) Current Opinion in Cell Biology 15:221-231.
Csikasz et al. (2006) Biophysical Journal 90:4361-4379.
Novak et al. (2007) Nature Cell Biology 9:724-728.

 

 

Refreshments at 4:30 in 657 Rhodes Hall.