QLS guest seminar - Friday, 22 February 11h00

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

QUANTITATIVE LIFE SCIENCES GUEST SEMINAR

Friday, 22 February 2019 at 11:00am,
ICTP, Central Area, 2nd floor, old SISSA building, via Beirut 2

Speaker: Daniel Sánchez Taltavull, University of Bern, Switzerland -  
Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR)

Title:  Mathematical modelling of red blood cell development

Abstract:
A requisite to understand the general principles underlying 
transcriptional regulation is to define its most important players (i.e. 
transcription factors and cofactors) quantitatively in absolute terms. 
Such global and quantitative knowledge is necessary to define the range 
of possibilities (i.e. the general context) within which TFs perform 
their functions from interacting to forming complexes, to being 
recruited to specific genes in specific nuclear environment. 
Furthermore, competition between TFs (for binding sites) is thought to 
be an important mechanism for driving cellular differentiation with 
changes in the stoichiometry between LS-TFs being considered as the 
central mechanism underlying cell fate choice.

We measure RNA-seq (transcriptomic) expression and SRM (proteomic) of a 
time series hematopietic stem cells differentiation into red blood 
cells. To study the data, first we perform a bioinformatics analysis of 
our samples to identify the most relevant genes. Second, we build a Gene 
Regulatory Network (GRN) of those genes based on previous knowledge and 
correlations in our time series. Third, we transform that GRN into a 
system of Ordinary Differential Equations to obtain a quantitative 
model. Fourth, we perform some knock-down experiments to validate our 
model. Our results show new interactions between genes and an accurate 
quantitative description of red blood cell development.

  Indico web page: http://indico.ictp.it/event/8886/ 
<http://indico.ictp.it/event/8888/http://indico.ictp.it/event/8888/>

Everyone interested is most welcome to attend!

-- 
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