14:00
Eukaryotic systems migrate in response to gradients in external signal concentrations, a process referred to as chemotaxis. This chemotactic behaviour may of either a chemoattractive or a chemorepulsive nature.
Understanding such behaviour at the single cell level in terms of the underlying signal transduction networks is highly challenging for various reasons, including the strong non-linearity of the signal processing as well as other complicating factors.
In this talk we will discuss modelling approaches which are aimed at trying to understand how signal transduction in the networks of eukaryotic cells can lead to appropriate internal signals to guide the cell motion either up-gradient or down-gradient. One part of the talk will focus on system-specific mechanistic modelling. This will be complemented by simplified models to address how signal transduction is organized in cells so that they may exhibit both attractive and repulsive gradient sensing.