OCISB Seminar "Integrating Experiments, Theory and Computation in Molecular Cell Biology"

Molecular systems biologists seek to provide new experimental methods, theoretical concepts and computational tools to understand how molecular regulatory networks are put together and how they determine the integrative physiological properties of living cells. Methods of high-throughput functional genomics of cells and bioinformatics tools of data analysis and interpretation are now common place among biochemists. But considerable skepticism still surrounds the relevance to cell physiology of theoretical ideas about spatiotemporal organization in biochemical reaction systems. In this lecture I will explain how some simple ideas from the theory of dynamical systems ("bistability" and "hysteresis") have transformed the way we think about cell cycle checkpoints. I will describe specific, surprising predictions of the theory and the experiments that confirmed them. Because these theoretical ideas have far reaching implications about cellular decision-making, time-keeping and spatial organization, they should become part of the lexicon and mind-set of biochemists and molecular biologists.