糖心TV

Abstract: All cells - including those in our body - possess some degree of asymmetry or ‘polarity’, which is key to their healthy function and if disrupted can lead to serious cellular malfunctions like those found in cancer. In collaboration with the group of Rafael Carazo Salas (University of Cambridge) we have reconstructed with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution the molecular networks that regulate cell polarity using an interdisciplinary strategy - combining genetics, microscopy and computational approaches - and focusing on the polarity machinery of the archetypal model organism Schizosaccharomyces pombe (fission yeast). Using network analysis methods, we have identified the core set of genes/proteins that regulate cell polarity in fission yeast and obtained a basic interaction ‘network’ map connecting those genes/proteins, as well as discovered new molecular links between cell polarity, cell cycle and cytokinesis control. We determined the detailed network topology and the functional hierarchy among polarity regulators in this species and incorporated these results into a mathematical model that captures the polarity pattern changes throughout the cell cycle of fission yeast cells. In this talk I will present results and ongoing work of this interdisciplinary collaboration.

Biography: Attila Csikasz-Nagy studied as a bioengineer at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and received his PhD from the same institute for his work on mathematical models of the cell cycle regulation. After a short postdoc position in the USA he started teaching back at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He served a group leader for five years in the Microsoft Research – University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology and for three years at Fondazione Edmund Mach, both in Italy. Since 2012 he is a senior lecturer in computational and systems biology at King’s College London and since 2015 he also works at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics. His research is focused on mathematical and computational investigations of the dynamical behaviour of biological networks.