QLS GUEST SEMINAR - Tuesday, 13 November 18h30

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

Quantitative Life Sciences Guest Seminar

Tuesday, 13 November 2018 18h30
ICTP, Adriatico Guest House, Kastler Lecture Hall, via Grignano 9

Speaker: Tetsuya J. Kobayashi - Laboratory for Quantitative Biology 
Institute of Industrial Science, Univ. Tokyo

Title: Inference of latent growth-related states of cells from cellular 
lineage trees

Abstract:
Individual cells are phenotypically heterogeneous even with the same 
genetic background. The heterogeneity endows the cells with different 
growth capabilities.
This difference in turn works as the driving force of the natural 
selection among the cells, and the population gradually adapt to the 
environment as the population level.
Therefore, quantification of the growth capabilities from data is 
crucial for understanding how the evolutionary learning of the cells is 
shaped and regulated in a population.
To this end, we propose an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based algorithm 
to infer the growth capability as hidden states of cells from cellular 
lineage trees.
We modified the EM algorithm to account for the tree structure of the 
lineage tree and resolved the sampling bias problem (survivorship bias) 
that inevitably appears in an evolving population.
By applying our method to a lineage tree data of E.coli, we identified 
hidden states of the cells that may be linked to the slowing changing 
activity of the cells.
This method may contribute to facilitating our quantitative 
understanding on the Darwinian adaptation operating at the cellular level.

Indico: http://indico.ictp.it/event/8799/

-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
www.ictp.it/research/qls.aspx
e-mail: qls at ictp.it