Cellular Decision Making & Control

Gathering and processing information is fundamental to cellular life and, ultimately, intracellular biochemical networks `decide' a cell's response to an environmental change. Disease is a failure in cellular decision-making, whether it is a hijacking of the signaling network by an invading virus, the uncontrollable growth of cancer cells, or mis-timings in the contractions of individual heart cells. This team uses mathematics to understand the information processing of cellular signaling systems. Assuming that cells have evolved to optimize the information they receive, the team proposed this year a general framework for analyzing cellular decisions. Using simulations, this framework was used to study response mechanisms in bacteria. The team also developed a computational method to more accurately simulate the fluctuations that can corrupt cellular signals and proposed novel biochemical mechanisms that may have evolved to reduce these fluctuations. This project ended in 2008.