The evolution of cellular individuality

3 April 2015

Eric Deeds
Department of Molecular Biosciences
University of Kansas

Abstract

Signaling networks in metazoan cells are notoriously complex, which often makes it difficult to reason about their function at a systems level. One major contributor to this complexity is crosstalk: the global topology of these networks is generally not organized as a discrete set of pathways, but rather as a highly interconnected web in which each individual input signal is connected to a large number of downstream outputs. Another confounding feature of these signaling networks is their variability: individual cells within an isogenic population of cells can often respond quite differently to the same set of input signals. I will discuss some of our recent work that suggests both of these phenomena (variability and crosstalk) have evolved to satisfy some of the constraints that multicellularity places on intracellular communication.

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