Abstract

Oscillations are observed in a wide variety of biological systems, including cell signalling. Oscillations are essential to control cellular processes, such as muscle contraction, secretion, cell division and gene expression and are generated through complex interactions between signalling molecules, enzymes and transporters within the cell. Recent development in fluorescent and electrophysiological techniques allowed us to quantify signalling molecules with remarkable spatial and temporal resolutions as well as to build theoretical models based on such data. The advantage of using theoretical models is that we can study complex dynamic property of the systems analytically or numerically and discover new experimental approaches, while the disadvantage is that it is extremely difficult to build models good enough for such purpose. This seminar will first give an overview of this field and then introduce some recent works by the speaker and other groups to discuss how experimental and theoretical studies can be combined to gain a real understanding of oscillations in cell signalling.