Abstract

Abstract: Cell cycle and circadian rhythms are conserved biological processes with robust cyclic features. The interactions between these two oscillators are objective of active research. Cell division cycle seems to be gated by circadian clock, possibly by the clock transcription factor (BMAL1/CLK) induced cell cycle kinase, WEE1 . On the other hand, a clock component (i.e. FRQ in Neurospora crassa and mPer1 in mouse) is phosphorylated by cell cycle kinase, CHK2 , upon DNA damage. These data indicate that there are bi-directional interactions between the cell cycle and the circadian clock. The reasons for the links remain unclear. We build computational models to understand how a molecular interaction network determines the experimentally observed physiology of these biological systems. Starting from the biological problem, I will describe the methods we used to investigate the importance and results of connection between these two fundamental biological systems.

Biography: Judit Zámborszky attended the Faculty of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. She received an M.S. degree in Bioengineering in 2007 (thesis title: “Connection between the cell cycle and the circadian rhythm in mammalian cells”) under the guidance of Attila Csikász-Nagy. In 2004 she began to work with mathematical modeling in the Molecular Network Dynamics Research Group, led by Professor Béla Novák. She started her current research on cell cycle and circadian rhythm modeling with deterministic and stochastic approaches in 2005, working with Attila Csikász-Nagy and Christian I. Hong (Dartmouth College, USA ). In 2007 she won first prize in Bioinformatics at the National Scientific Student Conference of Hungary in Biological Sciences. The focus of her work was to build and couple models by writing ordinary differential equations for the interactions in the regulatory network and analyze these two basic and important oscillating endogenous devices by computational simulations, phase-plane portraits, bifurcation diagrams and other methods.