Algorithmic Systems Biology Course (ASBCourse09) starting on 25/3/09: it is an internal course organized by CoSBi and open to our collaborators.

Systems biology and ecological networks have several similarities (despite they have focused in different spatio-temporal scales). For example, 1) systems biology and food webs explore network behavior, in particular the factors that regulate gene expression and fluctuations in populations, respectively. 2) They explore the effect of deletion-addition of nodes (i.e., proteins, species...etc) to extinction-diversification and major changes in network structure. 3) They also have highly heterogeneous and context dependent data that make difficult the use of general models. Those similarities trigger open discussions and interchange of new ideas and methods. There is, however, a challenging link between systems biology and ecological networks. Both approaches deal with regulation-fluctuations-persistence in the short term but also with speciation and extinction at molecular and species level in the long term. The development of models of DNA sequence evolution with explicit mechanism of regulation and speciation at molecular and species level is a fundamental connection between them. These models could link the effect of gene regulatory networks--individual behavior on micro--macroevolution and thus on morphological evolution, speciation and diversity in molecular--ecological systems. In this talk I aim to reconcile neutral DNA sequence evolution models with explicit mechanisms of speciation at species level. The model contains genetic--ecological drift and explicit mechanisms of speciation as the main forces governing ecological networks (i.e., food web structure and dynamics). I'll present an approximation to the speciation rate and a maximum likelihood approach to test simultaneously the general structure of the individuals interactions (i.e., individual rank in connectivity) and diversity (i.e., species rank in abundance) in several spatio-temporal conditions using a sampling effort of 30520 individuals (i.e., stomach contents) and an estimated abundance of 10^8 individuals. Finally, I'll attempt to discuss some preliminary extensions of the model in the context of gene regulatory networks and how small improvements of those models can increase our understanding of diversity in molecular--ecological systems.

Location	Meeting room A
Date and Time	28-07-2009 at 11:00
Speaker	Carlos J. Melian
From	University of California - Santa Barbara
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