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Robert Endres

 

Wednesday 4th February 2015

Time: 4pm

 

B10 Basement Floor Seminar Room

Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR

 

 

Information processing by the probrain: how bacteria sense and respond

 

Abstract

Sensory systems have evolved to respond to input stimuli of certain statistical properties, and to reliably transmit this information through biochemical pathways. Hence, for an experimentally well-characterised sensory system, one ought to be able to extract valuable information about the statistics of the stimuli. Based on dose-response curves from in vivo fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) experiments of the bacterial chemotaxis sensory system and information theory, we predict the chemical gradients chemotactic Escherichia coli cells typically encounter in their natural environment. Furthermore, a principle emerges - maximising information transmission maximises the drift of cells up the chemical gradient. In ongoing work, we extend this analysis to time-dependent stimuli and make connections with thermodynamics.

Short Biography

Robert Endres is Reader (Assoc. Prof.) in Systems Biology at Imperial College London. His research group addresses fundamental problems in sensing and signalling in collaboration with biologists. Before starting at Imperial College in 2007, Robert was a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Ned Wingreen in the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton University, where he deciphered the remarkable signalling properties of bacterial chemotaxis, and atomistically predicted protein-DNA binding sites. In 2002 he obtained a PhD in physics from the University of California at Davis. His work, conducted in the group of Prof. Daniel Cox, dealt with charge transfer in biomolecules, in particular in DNA. In 1999 he obtained a Masters degree in physics from the University of Goettingen in Germany. The academic year 1996/1997 he spent at the University of California at Santa Cruz.