Principal Investigator Leonid Mirny
Molecular biology traditionally studies biological systems by reducing them to components and pathways that are simple enough to characterize in vitro. However, focusing on individual molecules and pathways does not lead one to a broad picture of the functioning of whole cells, tissues or organs. My goal is to develop a system-level understanding of biological circuits. This work combines bioinformatics techniques with computer simulation to model biological networks and study their dynamics and evolution. One such project in my laboratory involves the use of genomic and systems biology to characterize networks of protein-protein interactions in yeast. We are trying to deduce dynamics and function from information about system architecture. A second project focuses on the challenge of building a robust system from stochastic elements. All biological systems are comprised of molecules that participate in biochemical reactions, but these interactions are stochastic in nature. Systems built from probabilistic components should be unreliable but, in fact, biochemical pathways in living cells do work reliably. The goal of this project is to determine how it is possible to build a reliable system from intrinsically unreliable components.