12 December 2008
Philippe Cluzel
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Harvard University
In recent years, there have been significant efforts in single cell biology to characterize the noise associated with the regulation of intracellular processes. Intrinsic fluctuations are often due to the small number of molecules that govern these processes. However, noise is not always caused by a low number of molecules; the dynamics of the regulatory network itself can produce large fluctuations in cellular behavior. Using the chemotaxis signal transduction network in E. coli as a model system, I will discuss a mathematical framework that allows us to infer the cellular response to a small external stimulus by analyzing the noise in non-stimulated cells.