About Lausanne CompBio

The goal of this meeting series is to bring together various UNIL, CHUV and EPFL groups who are active in Computational and Quantitative Biology. This 10th event will take place at UNIL Auditorium B in the Genopode building. The meeting is organised and supported by the UNIL Department of Computational Biology.

Organising comittee

• Anneke Brummer
• David Dylus
• Matteo Dal Peraro
• Sven Bergmann
• Christophe Dessimoz

Schedule

11:30 - 12:00: Registration + Coffee

12:00 - 12:25: Patrick Barth (EPFL): TBA

12:25 - 12:50: Andy Oates (EPFL): On clocks and timers in development

12:50 - 13:25: Lunch break

13:25 - 13:50: Patrick Roelli (UNIL / TUM): TBA

13:50 - 14:15: Yolanda Schaerli (UNIL): Spatiotemporal pattern-forming synthetic gene regulatory networks

14:15 - 15:00: Desert & Coffee

Abstracts

Andy Oates (EPFL): On clocks and timers in development

Some biological oscillators function throughout the life of an organism, for example the circadian clock, whereas others have a more restricted duration, particularly in embryogenesis. The “segmentation clock” is a multi-cellular patterning system of genetic oscillators thought to control the rhythmic and sequential formation of the vertebrate embryo's body segments. Individual oscillating cells are synchronized with their neighbors, forming a coherent wave pattern of gene expression. How these wave patterns arise and how they are regulated during embryogenesis is not clear. I will describe recent progress in understanding the behavior of individual cells from the zebrafish as they slow their oscillations and differentiate during segmentation, and discuss how this gives rise to the tissue-level wave patterns. Central to this understanding is the concept of a timer that regulates the duration of a clock. This perspective reveals what part of the oscillatory cycle is changing as the cells slow and stop.

Yolanda Schaerli (UNIL): Spatiotemporal pattern-forming synthetic gene regulatory networks

Pattern formation, where initially equivalent cells start to express different genes depending on their position, is a crucial process during the development of multicellular organisms. Understanding the networks, mechanisms, and cues underlying biological pattern formation is one of the main challenges of developmental biology. Synthetic biology offers a novel approach to tackle this challenge and allows us to test and discover basic, general principles underlying complex embryogenesis processes.
In my talk, I will present our latest research on pattern-forming synthetic networks in populations of E. coli cells, including our work on the toggle switch and on synthetic circuits based on CRISPR interference for precise temporal and spatial control of gene expression.