Logic of Regulatory Circuits
EMBO Global Exchange Lecture Course Jan 12-18, 2012
Welcome
Aim and content of the course
Most studies on gene regulation describe the regulatory circuits, but rarely discuss the behavior or logic of such regulatory circuits. This is an area that most students (and PIs) do not get much exposure to. So it is critically important to stimulate the next generation of scientists with this topic, so that they can face the challenge of the future.
This lecture course will discuss topics such as noise, stochasticity, robustness, properties of network motifs, permissive and instructive signaling, timer, morphogen gradient, scaling, modularity, modeling, and applying this knowledge to design artificial regulatory circuits. The lectures will range from theoretical analysis of circuits behaviors to experimental systems where these principles were actually tested. The course is designed primarily for students and postdocs working in experimental biology, so the course will have some but not too much mathematics. We hope also to attract some students from the theoretical and computational biology, and from the engineering fields, so that they will get interested in the complex behavior of biological systems. The interaction of these participants from diverse fields will be intellectually stimulating.
The course will only be open to those students admitted to the course. 60 students will be selected among the applicants.
A one day symposium on Jan 14 (Saturday) will be open to the research community.
To encourage student active participation, the course includes 9 hours of journal clubs. The students will be divided into small groups. Each group will present a paper assigned by the lecturers before the class. The group will have to read the paper and discuss among themselves. Each presentation will be 30 minutes + 30 minutes discussion, with the responsible lecturer presiding and leading the discussion.
Application is open until quota is filled.
