Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, USA

Modelling of metabolic networks

(not supplied)

ITQB-UNL - Biomathematics Group

From rhythms to films: combining bottom-up and top-down approaches to complex biosystems

In the present talk I will give a survey of my current research agenda involving two fields of activity: A) Biological rhythms and circadian clocks, in particular the synchronization of systems of coupled oscillators in heterogeneous and noisy environments, as well as the analysis of rhythmic in vivo timeseries. B) Phototrophic biofilms, dealing with the integration and analysis of heterogeneous data sources and the modeling of stochastic growth processes. I will discuss the combined application of data- and hypothesis-driven methods, with a particular view on low-throughput systems, including the design requirements for universal data management and -analysis tools (data pipelines) for such kind of data.

Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Theoretical Immunology) and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

Antigen-receptor genetic diversity estimates using microarray technology. A quantitative reassessment

Ogle and colleagues proposed a new method to estimate diversity, in which mixtures of oligonucleotides, encoding antigen-receptor variable regions, isolated from lymphocyte pools are compared with standard mixtures of synthetic oligonucleotides with known diversity for their capacity to hybridize with microarrays containing thousands of V-region unrelated probes. Diversity estimates were derived from these hybridization patterns based on hit-counting. We now provide a full quantitative analysis of this technique aiming to better assess the precision and accuracy of the estimates it provides.