Seminar by Stefan Klumpp

Genes, machines, populations: Aspects of bacterial growth

Genetic circuits perform logical operations similar to electric circuits. However, genetic circuits are never fully decoupled from the background processes going on in the cell, because the molecular machinery processing the genetic information is shared with all other genes. Exponential growth of bacteria can be used as a model system to study this coupling. The talk will discuss several aspects of bacterial growth from a modeling perspective including the effects of growth rate and the division cycle on gene circuits and the role of these effects in tolerance of bacterial populations to antibiotics.