Intracellular signalling cascades and understanding the cellular response – A mathematical approach Seminar

40 years of combined experimental and theoretical research into understanding the cellular response and intracellular signalling cascades in Escherichia coli bacterial chemotaxis has become a paradigm for the recently emerged field of Systems Biology. In this talk I will consider the analysis of a recently published mathematical model of the signalling cascade within E. coli to answer a simple question regarding the cellular response. The results of the analysis indicate that variability in protein concentration and not the protein-protein interaction kinetics within the intracellular signalling cascade is a key determinant of the cell’s behaviour, affecting both the form of the response and the time scale over which it occurs. Model reduction of the original model allows us to determine the key components of the signalling network which are required to ensure a robust cellular response.