IBIS Research team

Modeling, simulation, measurement, and control of bacterial regulatory networks

Team presentation

Bacteria provide fascinating examples of the survival strategies developed by single-cell organisms to respond to environmental stresses. The stress responses of bacteria are controlled by large and complex networks of molecular interactions that involve genes, mRNAs, proteins, small effector molecules, and metabolites. The study of bacterial stress response networks requires experimental tools for characterizing the interactions making up the networks and measuring the dynamics of cellular processes on the molecular level. In addition, when dealing with systems of this size and complexity, we need mathematical modelling and computer simulation to integrate available biological data, and understand and predict the dynamics of the system under various environmental and physiological conditions. The analysis of living systems through the combined application of experimental and computational methods has gathered momentum in recent years under the name of systems biology.

The first aim of the IBIS project-team is the unravelling of bacterial survival strategies through a systems-biology approach, making use of both models and experiments. In particular, we will focus on the enterobacterium Escherichia coli, for which enormous amounts of genomic, genetic, biochemical and physiological data have been accumulated over the past decades. A better understanding of the survival strategies of E. coli in situations of nutritional stress is a necessary prerequisite for interfering with these strategies by specific perturbations or by even rewiring the underlying regulatory networks. This is the second and most ambitious aim of the research programme, which does not only spawn fundamental research on the control of living matter, but which may ultimately acquire medical relevance since E. coli serves as a model for many pathogenic bacteria.

Research themes

The aims of IBIS raise five main challenges that generate new problems on the interface of (experimental) biology, applied mathematics, and computer science.

In particular, the success of the project critically depends on:

  • the modeling of large and complex bacterial regulatory networks,
  • the simulation of the network dynamics by means of these models,
  • high-precision and real-time measurements of gene expression and metabolism,
  • the use of these data for model validation and identification,
  • the control and re-engineering of bacterial regulatory networks.

International and industrial relations

International relations Industrial relations:

Keywords: Modeling Simulation Regulatory networks Gene expression Bacteria Control Systems biology Synthetic biology

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