Seminars & Lectures
| * TITLE | Hamiltonaian of Life | ||||||
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| * DATE / TIME | 2011-08-24, 4:00pm | ||||||
| * ABSTRACT | |||||||
| Life is the fundamental physical process that can be addressed as a problem in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. To understand biological phenomena from a physicist’s viewpoint, we need to devise effective theory of life in biological systems of interest. To exemplify such approach, I introduce the way of how to construct and analyze effective Hamiltonian governing the composition of genomes in living organisms. The phenotype of any organism on earth is, in large part, the consequence of interplay between numerous gene products encoded in the genome, and such interplay between gene products may affect the evolutionary fate of the genome itself through the resulting phenotype. In this regard, contemporary genomes can be used as molecular fossils that record successful associations of various genes working in their natural lifestyles. By analyzing thousands of orthologs across ~600 bacterial species, we constructed the map of effective gene-gene associations conserved across much of the sequenced biome. The resulting Hamiltonian is analogous to that of Ising spin systems in statistical physics, reflecting functional couplings of genes regardless of their microscopic details. This approach may be applied to exogenous gene import in synthetic biology to engineer a cell for desired bioproduct production. |
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