Scientific Seminar: Metabolic constraints in living organisms

Cellular processes exact a metabolic price: the constant maintenance of fuel molecules and raw materials at sufficient concentrations to perform biological function. Whether/how the metabolic costs constrain biological processes in natural evolution remains elusive as the fitness of organisms is subject to many trade offs from bioenergetic costs to speed and accuracy of cellular processes. In this talk, I will present recent efforts in establishing a quantitative framework to study the influence of energy metabolism in evolution of cellular processes and development of organisms. The talk will have two parts focusing on different biological systems. In first part, we will discuss the evolution of biochemical networks. I will show how metabolic efficiency may explain the observed interaction affinities in gene regulatory (microRNA-mRNA) networks. In second part, we will shift our focus to tissue scale and I will present our theoretical model for on planarian gut morphogenesis. I will show how our model captures the scaling properties of branched morphology observed in experiments, and then discuss the relevance of this developmental process to the spatiotemporal organization of metabolism in the organism.