Lecturer: Herb Levine, Northeastern University; National Academy of Sciences
 Abstract:
Most studies of genetic networks ignore the role played by local reorganization of chromatin structure in determining the dynamics of transcription. However, recent experiments in E coli (related to supercoiling) and cancer cells (related to epigenetic modification of histones) have revealed cases where this is not sufficient. This talk will focus on creating theoretical models which couple small-scale chromatin degrees of freedom to transcriptional dynamics and discuss the consequences for transcriptional noise and for cell fate transitions.