Physics and Astronomy Calendar

Genomic sequences obtained from a large number of organisms have shown clearly that what make biological organisms complex lies not so much in the genes themselves but in the control of their expression (i.e., under what conditions the genes are turned on and off). The biophysical processes governing the control of gene regulation provides many interesting problems of statistical physics, including those involving disorders (protein-DNA interaction), nonlinear transport (transcriptional and translational elongation), and stochasticity (noisy gene expression). In this talk, I will focus on the strategy the cell uses to implement combinatorial control of gene expression. The analysis suggests that the control machinary operates as a molecular Boltzmann machine and can hence implement a wide variety of control functions.