Speaker: Naama Brenner, Ph.D.
Professor, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Topic: What does the system care about? Empirical approaches to identifying biological regulation.
The complexity of biological regulation makes it difficult to understand, model or even identify what quantity is under regulation. Here two approaches are presented to empirically identify regulated variables in experimental data. First, a heuristic approach is employed to the well-studied process of bacterial growth and division. Robustness against perturbations is used as a measure for regulation, and a hierarchy of variables are identified that span a range of regulation. Then, a more general computational framework is presented, utilizing the strength of machine learning algorithmic techniques. Defining a coefficient of regulation enables to set up an optimization problem mathematically. The algorithm developed shows remarkable success in benchmark validations and can be applied to various data-sets.
