Venue: FIAS Lecture Hall 0.100

Our next "CMMS Talks" event with a talk by Dr. Nils Becker will take place on Thursday, 12 December 2024 at 2 p.m. in the FIAS Lecture Hall 0.100.

Abstract:

I will present two studies that attempt to identify optimal design of biological function. The first investigates the molecular design of cytokine receptor systems. Inflammatory signaling is mediated by a set of type-I interferons (IFNs). Although different IFNs share one receptor complex (IFNAR), they are found to elicit different cellular responses, and so appear to signal different messages. We scrutinize the particular heterodimeric architecture of IFNAR, and find that compared to monomeric or homodimeric receptors, this architecture is optimized for digital signalling, encoding ligand type but buffering against uncontrollable ligand concentration fluctuations. The second study addresses schizogony, the reproduction of the malaria parasite Plasmodium within red blood cells. In schizogony, nuclei replicate in a common cytoplasm to produce ~20 offspring over ~12h. Time-lapse fluorescence microscopy shows that DNA replication in different nuclei is coupled but strongly asynchronous. We formulate a biophysical model of nuclear cycle regulation in which DNA replication machinery acts as a crucial limiting resource. We show that time-sharing of resource between nuclei can be tuned to optimize the speed of nuclear replication. We argue that Plasmodium falciparum takes advantage of this effect to increase its reproduction rate.