Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Computational Analysis of Regulatory Structure and Its Impact on Control of Gene Expression Dynamics

Mahendra Prajapat

IIT Bombay

All living organisms, from single-celled prokaryotes to complex multicellular eukaryotes, live in an ever changing environment. They are able to sense these changes and accordingly process the information, which leads to precise decision-making, resulting in accurate and robust responses, necessary to adapt in their dynamic surroundings. By doing this, cell has the ability to appropriately alter its physiology to encounter precise environmental conditions thus, exhibiting multiple phenotypes in a wide range of environments. Moreover, it is also observed that genetically identical cells can exhibit different phenotypes even in the same environment.
Information processing is a key in regulation of phenotypic expressions in bacterial cells. It includes a number of cellular functions, which are mainly controlled via gene regulation. Moreover, the structure of regulatory networks potentially shapes the dynamics of regulation. However, how a cell processes environment using its cellular knowledge to respond appropriately is partially understood, at best.
In these lines, I study integration and processing of information at various levels of regulation including signal transduction, transcriptional regulatory structure, higher regulatory structure, cell-cell communication, and control in eukaryotic cells. In this talk, I will describe one or two examples from our recent work and try to address the following questions: Why and how does a cell choose certain regulatory designs for a particular gene regulation pattern? What factors help the cell do so? How does the environmental feedback contribute towards evolution of the shape of regulatory mechanisms? Which additional criteria, apart from genetics, dictate performance of cellular functions?