Dr. Johannes Berg
Physikalisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-University

"Out-of-equilibrium dynamics of gene expression"

The dynamics of gene expression is characterized by two key elements: (i) The transcription a gene is driven by transcription factor molecules. The number of transcription factors present in a cell changes constantly, keeping the system out of equilibrium. (ii) The transcription of a gene involves a small number of molecules, leading to a noisy dynamics marked by large fluctuations.

In this talk I discuss a simple mapping between models of gene expression and stochastic systems driven out of equilibrium, which allows to trace the effects of transcription factor concentration changes in data.

Applications include the determination of mRNA degradation rates and regulatory interactions between genes from experimental gene expression data.