Mathematical modeling of yeast stress response and cell cycle regulation

Staff - Faculty of Informatics

Start date: 4 April 2012

End date: 5 April 2012

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Edda Klipp

DATE: Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30

ABSTRACT:
Cells have to grow and to divide. This is a well-organized, highly regulated process. Since cells also have to react to changes in the environment, cell cycle must be both robust against and sensitive to changes. The ability to perceive and respond to information from their environment is one of the most ubiquitous properties of cellular organisms. It is crucial for a cell to react appropriately to changes or signals in its environment. This becomes apparent in many situations such as the search for nutrients, the detection of potentially harmful external conditions and in cell-cell communication as it is required for any multi-cellular organism. Even though there is a huge selection of perceivable signals the underlying mechanisms are surprisingly alike, which suggests that they are highly conserved in the course of evolution.Here, we apply different modeling techniques to understand cell cycle progression and cell cycle regulation in changing environments, with specific focus on mechanisms and experimental data for the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Specifically, new aspects in cell cycle regulation and the interaction of stress-activated signaling pathways with cell cycle progression will be discussed. The results indicate that yeast cells have developed different mechanisms for coping with external stress during different periods of their life time.

BIO:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Edda Klipp is the Head of the department of Theoretical Biophysics at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (http://www2.hu-berlin.de/biologie/theorybp/).  Klipp  obtained her Diploma in Biophysics as well as her Doctorate in Theoretical Biophysics at the Humboldt University Berlin.  Between 2001 and 2008 she was the head of the Junior Research Group "Kinetic Modeling" at the Department Vertebrate Genomics (Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, and Berlin Center for Genome Based Bioinformatics (BCB)). Since 2008 until present she is Professor for Theoretical Biophysics at Humboldt University Berlin. Her Research interests include:

  • Mathematical modeling of biochemical reaction networks: Investigation of metabolism, signaling and gene expression using description with differential equations, stochastic approaches. Property prediction using optimization approaches.
  • Reconstruction of networks Systems biology: integrating different levels of knowledge and theoretical techniques to understanding the performance of biological pathways.

HOST: Prof. Illia Horenko