Genomics - Weekly Calendar

Jeremy England, MIT, Statistical Physics of Self-Replication
http://www.englandlab.com/

Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.
Joseph Henry Room, Jadwin Hall  ·  12:00 p.m.– 1:00 p.m.

Tim Stearns, Stanford, Centrosomes, Cilia and Cell Signaling
http://stearnslab.stanford.edu/

The central question behind our work is how the centrosome and primary cilium control cell function and influence development, and how defects in these structures cause a remarkable range of human disease phenotypes, ranging from cancer, polycystic kidney disease, and obesity, to neurocognitive defects including mental retardation, schizophrenia, and dyslexia.  The talk will cover fundamental questions including 1) how is an organelle duplicated exactly once per cell cycle? 2) how are signaling pathway components concentrated sub-cellularly to effect efficient signaling and 3) how can we use genomic analysis of specialized cell types to understand cell structure and function?


Carl Icahn Lab 101  ·  4:15 p.m.– 5:15 p.m.

Rachel Dutton, Harvard FAS Bauer Fellow, Food for thought: Cheese as model microbial ecosystem
http://sysbio.harvard.edu/csb/research/dutton.html

And see, in the Sept. 19 NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/dining/for-gastronomists-a-go-to-microbiologist.html

Carl Icahn Lab 101  ·  4:30 p.m.– 5:30 p.m.