MATH 499 VIGRE Seminar: Mathematical Models in Developmental Biology

Meeting: Tuesday, 4 pm, Herman Brown Hall, 4^th Floor

Spring 2006 Tentative Schedule:

T January 17^th		Organizational Meeting
T January 24^th	Heather	Drosophila Development
T January 31^st	Tim	Protein System Program
T February 7^th	Diane	Papers 1), 2), & 3)
T February 14^th	Trevor	Papers 4) & 5)
T February 21^st	Tim	Papers 6) & 7)
T February 28^th		Program data/results/discussion
T March 7^th	Katri	Papers 8), 9)
T March 14^th		Spring Break
T March 21^st	Nick	Papers 10), 11)
T March 28^th	Heather	Results update, comparison of data with published papers
T April 4^th
T April 11^th
T April 18^th
T April 25^th
End of Semester

Fall 2005 presentations

Spring 2005 presentations

Fall 2004 presentations

Papers

1) Dynamics of Drosophila embryonic patterning network perturbed in space and time using microfluidics - Diane

2) Morphogens: precise outputs from a variable gradient - Diane

3) Morphogen gradient from a noisy source - Diane

4) The interpretation of morphogen gradients - Trevor

5) Diffusion and scaling during early embryonic pattern formation - Trevor

6) Finding the center reliably: robust patterns of developmental gene expression - Tim

7) Dynamic control of positional information in the early Drosophila embryo – Tim

8) Bicoid determines sharp and precise target gene expression in the Drosophila embryo - Katri

9) Shaping BMP morphogen gradients in the Drosophila embryo and pupal wing - Katri

10) Engineering gene networks to emulate Drosophila embryonic pattern formation - Nick

11) BMP signalling: synergy and feedback create a step gradient - Nick

12) Topology and robustness in the Drosophila segment polarity network –

Protein System Program

Here’s the good coefficient files we have found for the 4-protein system:

Bestset8.coeff

Bestset13.coeff

Questions we’d like to answer:

Is this actually a 3-protein system?
Is it robust to other initial conditions (vary bicoid by small random perturbations, etc.)?
Is it scale invariant?
Can we locally vary parameters?

Basic ‘How-To’

What are we studying?

In this seminar, we are looking at models for the genetic regulatory network that serves as the basis for Drosophila segmentation. We are studying some of the basic models for this process, as well as reading current biological research papers. We are also looking at exploring this new notion of robustness, hoping to mimic the naturally stable biological system in a mathematical model.