Influence of Cellular Substructure on Gene Expression and Regulation

Series
Applied and Computational Mathematics Seminar
Time
Monday, April 12, 2010 - 1:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Samuel Isaacson – Boston University Mathematics Dept.
Organizer
Silas Alben
We will give an overview of our recent work investigating the influence of incorporating cellular substructure into stochastic reaction-diffusion models of gene regulation and expression. Extensions to the reaction-diffusion master equation that incorporate effects due to the chromatin fiber matrix are introduced. These new mathematical models are then used to study the role of nuclear substructure on the motion of individual proteins and mRNAs within nuclei. We show for certain distributions of binding sites that volume exclusion due to chromatin may reduce the time needed for a regulatory protein to locate a binding site.