Inferring dynamics from structure in biological networks

Departments: Electrical Engineering
Time: Thursday, March 4, 2021 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Muhammad Ali Al-Radhawi, Northeastern University
Room/Office:
Location:

Yale Department of Electrical Engineering Seminar

Muhammad Ali Al-Radhawi

“Inferring dynamics from structure in biological networks”

Thursday, March 4, 2021 4:00 PM
Zoom Presentation

Abstract: Biological systems are similar to their engineered counterparts in many aspects. They sense, compute, and make decisions in noisy, time-varying, and uncertain environments. However, the secrets of their inner workings remain poorly understood. One of the complicating factors is that they use unique and intrinsically nonlinear information processing structures. In addition, they operate under severe forms of uncertainty that permeate kinetics, time, and space. Therefore, for proper functioning, such systems ought to use specific architectures that bestow structural robustness and allow their operation. In this talk, I will present a novel system-theoretic framework that is able to decisively determine the spectrum of possible dynamical behaviors of a large class of highly nonlinear biochemical networks based on structural information alone. This allows us to understand sources of robustness in many major signaling and gene regulation motifs. Furthermore, the proposed framework enables the construction of computable trapping sets that can be used to keep trajectories within safe limits.

I will also present mechanisms used by gene regulatory networks for the generation of highly heterogeneous populations using simple architectures (commonly known as non-genetic heterogeneity). Our framework is applicable to wide classes of networks and offers analytically computable expressions.

Finally, I will briefly consider the reverse problem of determining the structure from dynamic data. Using system-theoretic insights, the structural interactions between tumor, immune system, and chemotherapy drugs can be revealed in a tractable manner, and be used to offer verifiable predictions. This opens the door for a more rational approach to chemotherapy.

Bio: M. Ali Al-Radhawi is an associate research scientist at Eduardo Sontag's lab at Northeastern University. He received his PhD in systems and control engineering from Imperial College London in 2016, and he held postdoctoral positions at MIT and Northeastern afterward. His research interests include analyzing and engineering the dynamical interactions in systems and synthetic biology.

Hosted by: Prof. Steve Morse