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Séminaire : CONTRAINTES
Epigenetics, aging and symmetry: or why DNA is not a program
Entrée libre.
Horaire : 14 h
- Date : 19/11/2010
- Lieu : Inria Rocquencourt, Bâtiment 8
- Intervenants : Jean Krivine (PPS)
- Organisateurs : CONTRAINTES
Without committing to any controversial definition, one may describe aging as a continuous and irreversible process by which molecules, cells or organs accumulate changes in time. With this simple definition, the process by which embryonic stem cells progressively loose their pluripotency by differentiation and acquire fixed functions in various tissues can be viewed as an instance of the aging process. From a modeling perspective there is a need to find a mechanistic molecular implementation of this phenomenon with the hope to better understand age related deceases or cancer. This model of cell development is strongly constrained by the fact that each cell of a single organism, be it a neuron or a stem cell, shares a copy of the same genetic code. It results
that the "program" that governs the function of a cell cannot be solely contained in the genes and has to be hidden in some "meta" instructions on top of these genes.
Recent technological breakthrough in molecular biology are starting to reveal the structure of this meta-code that biologists call epigenetic. In this talk we will survey this revolutionary view of genes, cells and function with a computer-science oriented spirit, having in mind that we are facing an evolution-based toolkit for the treatment of genetic information that should most likely beget interesting concepts for computer science and informatics.
Mots-clés : Séminaire Paris - Rocquencourt CONTRAINTES
