Location: Bahen Centre Room 1190

May 28, 2010- 3:30 p.m.
Professor Leah Keshet
University of British Columbia

Mathematical adventures in cell biology

Cell motility plays a vital role in the development and morphogenesis of multicellular organisms, in the function of our immune system, and in pathologies such as metastatic cancer. It also presents a fascinating topic where disciplines such as cell biology, biochemistry, mathematics, and scientific computation intersect. In this talk I will survey the work done in my group over the last few years on the actin-based motility of animal cells, and on the regulatory system that controls the spatio-temporal behaviour of a motile cell.

One of the first issues I address concerns the symmetry breaking that initiates cell polarization. In this first step, a cell must respond to a weak external signal (e.g. chemical gradient) by committing to a direction of motion. I discuss the biological signaling that is responsible, and describe some of the mathematics developed to understand the underlying mechanism. I also describe our successive steps at understanding the signaling pathways module by module, and how these steps eventually allowed us to develop a computational model for cell motility. I will also describe ongoing work with experimental biologists on specific aspects of this research related to carcinoma cells.

This work has been joint with Adriana Dawes, Stan Maree, Alexandra Jilkine, Yoichiro Mori, Ben Vanderlei, Veronica Grieneisen, Nessy Tania, and Georg Walther

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