Regensburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 7: Coupled Problems in Biological Systems (Focus Session)

BP 7.1: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 7. März 2016, 11:15–11:45, H45

Relating biological networks to gene expression patterns — •Marc-Thorsten Hütt — Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

Understanding, how a gene expression pattern – the simultaneous measurement of gene activity for a large number of genes in a cell – emerges from the dynamics of a gene regulatory network is one of the key challenges at the interface of statistical physics and systems biology.

The last two decades have shown that the statistical physics of complex networks can serve as a powerful toolbox for addressing this challenge. The guiding questions are: (1) How is a gene expression pattern ’generated’ by the underlying regulatory network? (2) What functional state (e.g., from the perspective of the cell’s metabolic network) does the gene expression pattern define?

At the same time, the conceptual limitations of mapping an intricate biological system onto the formal language of nodes and links have become apparent.

Here I will describe recent developments in this field, starting from investigations of network topology and then moving to dynamics on graphs and, finally, to a network-guided interpretation of gene expression patterns in biology and medicine.