Speaker: Michael Elowitz, Ph.D.
Professor of Biology and Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Title: Many-to-many protein networks: modules of multicellularity
In multicellular organisms, many biological pathways exhibit a curious structure, involving sets of protein variants that bind or interact with one another in a many-to-many fashion. What functions do these complicated architectures provide? And can similar architectures be useful in synthetic biology? Here, I will discuss recent work in our lab that shows how many-to-many circuits can function as versatile computational devices, explore the roles these computations play in natural biological contexts, and show how many-to-many architectures can be used to design synthetic multicellular behaviors.