Peter Swain, SynthSys, School of Biological Sciences, UoE

Identifying sources of variation in biochemical networks

To understand how cells control and exploit biochemical fluctuations, wemust identify the sources of stochasticity, quantify their effects, anddistinguish informative variation from confounding "noise". I willpresent an analysis that allows fluctuations of biochemical networks tobe decomposed into multiple components, gives conditions for the designof experimental reporters to measure all components, and provides atechnique to predict the magnitude of these components from models.Further, I will identify a particular component of variation that can beused to quantify the efficacy of information flow through a biochemicalnetwork.