27 May 2005
Terry Hwa
Center for Theoretical Biological Physics
UC San Diego
I will introduce a number of theoretical and experimental studies carried out in my lab to study gene regulation in bacterial systems. Here is a sample list of questions we are addressing: What type of transcriptional control functions are implementable via the arrangement of cis-regulatory sequences? How can large fold-changes in protein levels be obtained from limited fold-changes in mRNA levels? What distinct functions might small regulatory RNAs provide with respect to regulatory proteins? How to evolve promoters and study promoter evolution? In this seminar I will focus on the first and second questions, and discuss a number of interesting system-level issues encountered through these studies.
N E Buchler, U Gerland and T Hwa, "On schemes of combinatorial transcription logic", PNAS 1005136-41 2003. PubMed
L Bintu, N E Buchler, H Garcia, U Gerland, T Hwa, J Kondev, T Kuhlman, R Philips, "Transcriptional regulation by the numbers: applications", Curr. Op. Genet. Dev. 15:125-135 2005. PubMed
N E Buchler, U Gerland and T Hwa, "Nonlinear protein degradation on the funtions of genetic circuits", PNAS to appear 2005.