UCLA Bioinformatics Program

Speaker: Saeed Tavazoie (Dept. of Molecular Biology, Princeton Univ.

When: Mon, Jan 14, 2008

Where: CNSI Auditorium

Abstract:
Searching for general principles that connect molecular network organization, physiology and evolution has become a dominant pursuit in systems-biology. However, insights from such studies have, by and large, come from interpretation of experiments in the laboratory context, with little regard to the complex ecological habitats that have shaped these networks over geological timescales. However, evolutionary history and ecological structure are very poorly understood in general.
To address these challenges, we have utilized supercomputer simulations to create a virtual ecology of microbial populations evolving in complex and dynamic environments. In this setting organisms evolve under precisely defined environments where multiple time-varying signals encode information about resource abundance. We show that these organisms and their randomly evolving biochemical networks are able to robustly model diverse habitat structures, achieving optimal internal representations that allow prediction of environmental trajectory. We further provide evidence for the existence of such predictive modeling in nature by revealing striking correlations of Escherichia coli transcriptional responses to ecologically relevant environmental perturbations. Our work suggests that a full understanding of organismal behavior and underlying mechanisms crucially depends on an intimate understanding of habitat structure over evolutionary timescales.

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