Speaker:
Sandro Azaele
- University of Leeds
Tuesday, April 4, 2017
at
11:30 AM
Ca' Vignal 1, aula A
Single-cell experiments have shown that gene expression in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes is inherently stochastic and cells are able to exploit as well as control such stochasticity. I will introduce some models which explicitly incorporate such stochasticity and are able to describe some basic features of the transcription and translation processes in living cells.
More specifically, I will discuss the two-stage and burst models, which describe the dynamics of the population sizes of mRNAs molecules and synthesized proteins. Because proteins typically live for several mRNA lifetimes, I will show how to achieve a great deal of analytical progress by introducing a separation of time scales in the dynamics. I will finally show to what degree the burst model -- which explicitly accounts for bursts in the population dynamics -- is in agreement with the two-stage model.
