Lecturer: Dr. Naama Brenner
Affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering,
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Abstract:
The capacity of cells and organisms to respond in a repeatable manner to challenging conditions is limited by a finite repertoire of adaptive responses. Beyond this capacity, novel and unforeseen challenges may elicit exploratory dynamics, improvisational in nature, which could provide response to a much broader array of conditions. However little is known about such exploration, its dynamics and its ability to converge to a new stable cell state.
I will review recent experiments on adaptation to unforeseen challenges. I will then describe a model of a gene regulatory network inspired by these experiments, which can converge to new adapted stable states by purely stochastic exploration. Such convergence is not guaranteed in a high-dimensional space, and indeed is not universal. Successful convergence requires outgoing hubs in the network, and is enhanced by their auto-regulation. Since these are both well-known properties of gene regulatory networks, these findings establish a basis for a biologically plausible mode of adaptation by exploratory dynamics.