CDS 270-4, 2010: Bio-Control

	Bio-Control
	Spring 2010

Instructor: Elisa Franco Faculty sponsor: Richard M. Murray Lectures: Tuesday 11-12PM, Friday 1-2PM, 110 Steele. NOTE: The Friday lectures will include discussing a paper related to the week topic. Papers will be announced about a week prior to the discussion. ===>>NEW: Mailing list <<=== Course Objectives Feedback loops, which are ubiquitous in engineered systems, play a fundamental role in most biological processes. The survival of any organism strictly depends on its ability to sense and react to changes in its environment. Like electrical and mechanical control systems, cells have the molecular gear necessary to sense, compute and actuate. What are the theoretical and experimental tools available to understand the regulatory circuitry in biochemical systems? This course will provide students with an organized overview of research work between control theory and molecular biology. The first part of the class will be dedicated to modeling, identification and control-theoretic methods for the analysis of biological networks, following a systems biology perspective. The second part of the class will instead focus on design principles, and the challenges related to constructing biological pathways. Can we build modular and robust networks satisfying performance specifications? This fascinating field offers a wide range of challenging open questions, which the students will be encouraged to critically discuss. Course Schedule Week Date Lecture Topic Papers considered in class BioControl Journal Club 1 Introduction, Modeling biological systems 29 March (M) Course overview and objectives, layers of control of gene expression. Slides Syllabus NA 2 April (F) Modeling: Ordinary Differential Equations. Slides Review on modeling genetic regulatory networks and Modeling the trp operon Model-based redesign of transcriptional networks 2 Building and analyzing models 6 April (T) CDS methods for dynamic performance and periodic behaviors. The case of Negative Auto-Regulation. Slides Detection of multistability, bifurcations and hysteresis in biological positive-feedback systems , Negative Autoregulation Speeds the Response Times of Transcription Networks NA 9 April (F) Modeling: Stochastic methods, Gillespie algorithm. Slides Gillespie's fundamental paper Defining bifurcations in stochastic systems Course Administration This course is a special topics course in which the lecture material has been prepared by a senior graduate student. The class is P/F only and there is no required homework and no midterm or final exam. Students will be required to work on an individual or team course project. Course Project Project proposals are due at 5pm on the last day of the Midterm examination period (May 4) and are due by 5pm on the last day of the final examination period (June 7). Project theme: select a cellular regulatory mechanism, define a list of important features of the system, come up with a modeling framework and carry out an analysis of its properties (e.g. stability, robustness, modularity...).