Invitation to Systems Biology Seminar Talk

A stochastic framework for modeling
the JAK-STAT signaling pathway

Dr. Christina Surulescu

Institut für Angewandte Analysis und numerische Simulation
Universität Stuttgart

    Time: Wednesday · 21. 6. 2006 · 1:30 p.m
    Place: IST Seminar Room 3.241 · Pfaffenwaldring 9 · Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Abstract

At the level of individual cells, signaling is crucial for decisions about division, specialization, death and metabolic control. For more advanced organisms, it controls growth, development, behavior and metabolism; defective signaling is therefore at the origin of many diseases, like cancer, diabetes and developmental illnesses. Here we propose a stochastic framework based on multivariate nonlinear stochastic differential equations to describe the dynamics of the JAK-STAT signal transduction pathway. This signal transduction through the erythropoietin receptor (EpoR) is essential for proliferation and differentiation of erythroid progenitor cells.
Such a stochastic setting consists of a known or proposed structure including stochastic terms which represent disturbances, inputs and unmodelled dynamics of the system. In this framework it becomes possible to use a priori (biophysical and/or biochemical) knowledge and at the same time to describe the noise in the system upon extracting information from data. This makes this approach an attractive tool for modeling the signal transduction dynamics, since the latter are not thoroughly understood or cannot be explicitly characterized deterministically. We consider here stochastic analoga of recent mathematical models of Timmer et al. (PNAS 2003, Int.J.Bif.Chaos 2004) for characterizing the dynamical behavior of the JAK-STAT signaling pathway via differential equations. We analyse our models and estimate the parameters upon using some nonlinear filtering techniques.
The results are based on joint work with N. Surulescu (IAM, University of Heidelberg) and the experimental data were provided by the group of Prof. Klingmüller (DKFZ Heidelberg).

Biographical Information

Since April 2006: Scientific assistant at the Institute for Applied Analysis and Numerical Simulation, University of Stuttgart
2004 - 2006: Research associate and postdoc at Institute for Applied Mathematics, IWR and BIOMS, University of Heidelberg
1999 - 2004: PhD at the Institute for Applied Mathematics and IWR, University of Heidelberg
Thesis: Modeling aspects and mathematical analysis of some fluid-elastic structure interaction problems
1998: Master of Science, West University of Timisoara, Romania
Specialization: Nonlinear functional analysis and its applications to fluid dynamics
1997: Diploma examination in Mathematics, West University of Timisoara