Content:
The regulation of transcription is a central process of biology for which, despite decades of study, a detailed mechanistic understanding is still missing. In recent years an exciting quantitative revolution has been underway in this research field, offering an excellent example of the potential of interdisciplinary research. In this seminar, we will discuss recent publications in this research field: starting from the simpler case of transcriptional regulation in bacteria, we will see how quantitative fluorescence microscopy methods allowed researchers to visualize the central dogma of molecular biology as it unfolds in a living cell, one molecule at a time. We will see how biophysical models have been used to interpret quantitative data, creating mathematical models that are both descriptive of the underlying molecular mechanisms and able to establish a quantitative link between genotype and phenotype. We will then move on to see what challenges arise, both experimentally and in terms of mathematical modelling, when one tries to extend the approaches used in bacteria to study transcriptional regulation in eukaryotes with a focus on Drosophila blastoderm segmentation.
Learning Outcome:
By presenting and discussing examples from the recent literature, the students will get an overview of the recent interdisciplinary research at the interface between physics and biology in the field of transcriptional regulation. After the seminar, students will be familiar with the state‐of‐the‐art biophysical methods to study transcription and understand the basics of thermodynamic models of gene regulation.
- Teacher: Stefano Ceolin
- Teacher: Christof Osman