BN Seminar

Thursday at 16:00, Frank Bruggeman (VU University, Amsterdam) will give a BN seminar in room E. His talk is entitled “The astonishing stochasticity of single cells: illustrated with theory and experiment”. 

“An inevitable characteristic of single reaction events in living cells is that they do not occur in synchrony. This causes spontaneous fluctuations in the concentrations of the reactant molecules. These fluctuations can propagate through the entire reaction network of a cell. In addition to reactions and network circuitry, cellular growth and partitioning of molecules during cell division generate noise as well. As a result, a particular cell can behave qualitatively different from other cells, even though they all have the same genome and growth history.  I will present how we combined theory and single-molecule counting of RNA molecules to elucidate the heterogeneity of baker’s yeast cells during a nutrient shift and of mammalian cells during constitutive gene expression.”