MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA

 WHEN:
On Thursday, October 21, 1999 at 2:20 PM

WHERE:
Durham Science Center, Room 255

WHAT:

Jim Rogers
Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, UNMC

will give a talk on

Abstract:
Intracellular biochemical signal transition is the process by which molecular information travels within a single cell. Individual cells receive thousands of signals from their environment and must respond with appropriate reactions. The biochemical mechanisms by which cells sense their environment, interpret the signals, and regulate their responses is currently among the most important and actively studied areas of biomedical research. Despite several significant breakthroughs, a full understanding of signal transduction has proved elusive. The difficulty is that the biochemical pathways involved have a network structure and this complex organization makes them difficult to study by classical methods. In this presentation, biochemical signal transduction will be introduced and evidence will be presented that mathematical approaches to model complex systems may provide fundamental new insights into this intriguing biological problem. Preliminary results will be presented from our use of the Boolean logic form of neural network theory (expressed in matrix form) to model the Ras/MAP kinase signal transduction pathway.

Refreshments served 20 minutes prior to the talk in DSC 255