Conference abstracts
Session C2 - Computational Mathematical Biology with emphasis on the Genome
July 19, 16:00 ~ 16:30 - Room B2
Mathematics of Transcription: Decoding cis-regulation from the Drosophiladae to the Sepsidae and back again
John Reinitz
University of Chicago, USA - reinitz@galton.uchicago.edu
The syncytial organization of the blastoderm stage of Drosophila development affords unique advantages for the mathematical modeling of transcriptional control. It is possible to use the entire embryo as a spatially resolved microarray in which the response of reporters to quantitatively assayed transcription factors can be monitored at cellular resolution. This provides an opportunity to construct quantitative and predictive models of transcriptional control that are not limited to single enhancers. I will discuss progress in this effort, with emphasis on a case where understanding conservation of function in the absence of conservation of sequence leads to the identification of functional clusters of binding sites that are arguably interpretable as cis-regulatory codons.