Speaker: Gabor Balázsi, Department of Systems Biology, University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

 

Title: Synthetic approaches to gene expression control: What can we learn from natural gene networks?

 

Time & place: 2pm at NCBI Library, B2 Floor, Building 38A

 

Abstract: 

 

Gene networks have evolved to optimize the survival of biological populations in a changing environment. Understanding how genes
 embedded in these networks determine cellular phenotypes is probably the most important post genomic question. While various top 
down and bottom up approaches contributed immensely to unraveling the connection between network structure and function, many 
aspects of this connection remain largely unexplored. I will illustrate how natural network- and promoter architecture jointly 
determine three key characteristics of gene expression, and how we can harness this information to build synthetic gene circuits 
for precise, non conventional control of gene expression.

 

References:

 

Balázsi G, Barabási AL, Oltvai ZN, Topological units of environmental signal processing in the transcriptional-regulatory network 
of Escherichia coli, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., USA, 102(22), 7841 7846 (2005).

 

Blake WJ, Balázsi G, Kohanski MA, Isaacs FJ, Murphy KF, Kuang Y, Cantor CR, Walt DR, Collins JJ, Phenotypic consequences 
of promoter-mediated transcriptional noise. Mol. Cell, 24(6), 853-865 (2006).

 

Murphy KF*, Balázsi G*, and Collins JJ, Combinatorial promoter design for engineering noisy gene expression. 
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 104(31), 12726-12731 (2007). *equal contribution

 

Nevozhay D, Adams R, Murphy K, Josic K, Balázsi G, Negative autoregulation linearizes the dose response and 
suppresses the heterogeneity of gene expression. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. (2009) in press.