Emergence and universality in the regulation of cell fate

Date

Jun 15, 2017

Time

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Speaker

Steffen Rulands

Affiliation

MPI PKS, Dresden

Series

TUD ZIH Kolloquium

Language

en

Main Topic

Informatik

Other Topics

Biologie, Physik, Informatik

Host

Ralph Müller-Pfefferkorn, Zentrum für Informationsdienste und Hochleistungsrechnen

Description

The development of an organism relies on the tightly orchestrated interplay of many cells. How do these cells build complex structures, like the heart? In this talk, I will show how collective dynamics emerge from the interaction of many molecules or cells, and how such emergence contributes to the mechanistic understanding of cell fate regulation. Combining single-cell genomics with statistical physics I will first show how collective dynamics in the primary layer of epigenetics - DNA methylation – may contribute to symmetry breaking in the early embryo. Moving from the molecular to the tissue scale I will then show that collective cell behaviour in growing tissues gives rise to a self-similar, “critical” dynamics of the progeny of marked cells, resulting in tissue-independent (universal) dependencies in lineage tracing experiments. Identifying these universalities provides the theoretical foundation to extract biological information from such experiments.
Since 2017 Steffen Rulands is a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. From 2003 to 2009 he studied physics at the University of Constance and Technical University Munich. He obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. After two years as postdoc he became a Herchel Smith fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2015 to 2016.

Links

• http://tu-dresden.de/veranstaltungen/termin?id=TUD591c43b87ddcb

Last modified: Jul 26, 2017, 6:37:19 PM