EE Seminar: Yeast response to multiple carbon sources: a case study of combinatorial signal integration

~~(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:   Dr. Yonatan Savir
                       Faculty of Medicine, Technion

Sunday, May 8th, 2016
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Yeast response to multiple carbon sources: a case study of combinatorial signal integration

Abstract
A major determinant of the fitness of biological systems is their ability to integrate multiple cues from the environment and coordinate their metabolism and regulatory networks accordingly. While much is known about the response to a single stimulus, our understating of combinatorial integration of multiple inputs is still limited. As a model system, we studied how yeast responds to hundreds of mixtures of preferred carbon source, glucose, and a less preferred one, galactose. Many of the components of this response, known as catabolite repression, are conserved from yeast to human. We found that, in contrast to the textbook view, instead of simply inhibiting galactose utilization when glucose is above a threshold concentration, individual cells respond to the ratio of glucose and galactose, and based on this ratio determine whether to induce genes involved in galactose metabolism. We investigate the genetic architectures that can result in a ratio sensing and how these architectures provide a fitness advantage which could have shaped the evolution of this property.

Bio: Dr. Yonatan Savir received his Bachelor’s degree from the Technion in Electrical Engineering and Physics and his PhD from the Dept. of physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute. He did his postdoctoral training at the Dept. of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Savir joined the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion as a principal investigator in October 2015. His lab focuses on studying, both experimentally and theoretically, the signal processing that links nutrient sensing, uptake, growth rate and understating its system level failure in disease and in aged cells.