Peter Schuster received his PhD in Chemistry and Physics from Vienna University, Austria, in 1967. Then he worked as Post-Doc researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. In 1973 he became full professor of theoretical chemistry at Vienna University and he is head of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry since then with an interruption of four year, 1992 – 1995, when he was the founding director of the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology (IBM) in Jena, Germany. His early works are dealing with intermolecular forces, in particular hydrogen bonds and ionwater interactions, which are relevant for the structure of biomolecules. His major research topic became in silico evolution at molecular resolution. In particular, with Manfred Eigen he conceived and developed the theory of quasispecies and hypercycles. Later he studied RNA structures and introduced the concept of neutral networks for sequence-structure mappings of biopolymers. Currently, he analyzes also gene regulation networks by conventional and inverse methods for dynamical systems. He has received many distinguished honors among them the Schrödinger Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the Philip-Morris Award. He was President of the AAS from 2006 to 2009 and is member of several academies, among them the German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, the Academia Europaea, London, and the National Academy of Sciences, USA.

Talk title: Problem solving by inverse methods in systems biology

Abstract: Systems biology is heading for the ambitious goal to model cells and organisms as integral entities by the methods of chemistry and physics. A hierarchy of levels of description is required ranging from chemical kinetics at the molecular level up to the interaction of cell organelles within the cell or organs within the organism. A true wealth of data is produced by the various ‘omics’ approaches from genome sequencing to protein interactions and signaling and eventually to functional genomics dealing with the role of molecules and supra-molecular complexes in the well-organized concerted actions of parts within higher unities. Data are available and models have been conceived, but the relation of data and model parameters is still not very well understood. The application of inverse methods might be very helpful: Two different levels of inverse methods techniques are conceivable: (i) parameter estimation for data and (ii) reverse engineering of model behavior from known parameters. Examples of both approaches will be discussed in the lecture.

Reference: Engl HW, Flamm C, Kügler P, Lu J, Müller S, Schuster P. 2009. Inverse problems in systems biology. Inverse Problems 25:123014 (51pp)