Applications of extreme statistics to cellular decision making and signaling
Cells must reliably coordinate responses to noisy external stimuli for proper functionality whether deciding where to move or initiate a response to threats. In this talk I will present a perspective on such cellular decision making problems with extreme statistics. The central premise is that when a single stochastic process exhibits large variability (unreliable), the extrema of multiple processes has a remarkably tight distribution (reliable). In this talk I will present some background on extreme statistics followed by two applications. The first regards antigen discrimination – the recognition by the T cell receptor of foreign antigen. The second concerns directional sensing – the process in which cells acquire a direction to move towards a target. In both cases, we find that extreme statistics explains how cells can make accurate and rapid decisions, and importantly, before any steady state is reached.
Date:
1 November 2024, 11:00 (Friday, 3rd week, Michaelmas 2024)
Venue:
Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road OX2 6GG
Venue Details:
L3
Speaker:
Prof Alan Lindsay (University of Notre Dame)
Organising department:
Mathematical Institute
Organiser:
Sara Jolliffe (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
sara.jolliffe@maths.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Dr Radek Erban (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Mathematical Biology and Ecology
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Sara Jolliffe
