Dynamic gene regulation

Our lab aims to understand how different types of gene expression dynamics are generated and what their consequences are for the organism. Many genes are not simply ‘off’ or ‘on’ but rather their expression varies over time in a complex manner. For example, circadian clock genes show oscillations in their expression level with a period of approximately 24 hours. In bacteria, stress responsive transcriptional regulators show stochastic pulses of activation, with heterogeneity between genetically identical cells. These different types of dynamics are controlled by gene regulatory networks and influenced by stochasticity due to the low numbers of molecules involved. We aim to understand the design principles of gene regulatory networks and how they operate within a stochastic context. We do this by using single-cell time-lapse microscopy to measure gene expression dynamics in individual bacterial and plant cells and using computational modelling to explore hypotheses for how the dynamics are generated. This is important for us to understand how organisms such as bacteria and plants anticipate and respond to environmental changes.

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