Nevan Krogan (University of California, San Francisco) will describe approaches and insights gained from characterizing the physical interaction network within mammalian cells and how intruding pathogen proteins harness and manipulate it.

Martha Bulyk (Harvard University) will report on innovative high-throughput approaches to understanding the gene regulatory network in quantitative terms, such as interaction affinities between DNA binding proteins and their diverse cognate sequences.

Networks and time 

The second session will highlight recent studies of kinetically controlled network behavior. Peter Sorger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Harvard University) will discuss insights gained from quantitatively measuring and modeling the activities of signal transducers that respond to death-inducing stimuli.

Alexander Hoffmann (University of California, San Diego) will report on recent work in applying parallel and experimental and kinetic modeling studies to the pathogen-responsive signal regulatory network and gene regulatory network to develop a “virtual cell” capable of predicting responses to pathogen exposure.

Karla Neugebauer (Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden) will address the role of kinetics in cotranscriptional splicing as a means to regulate the generation of alternate mature mRNAs. Thus, a key step in regulating gene expression may be understood only by integrating the biochemical processes of transcription and splicing that were previously studied separately.

Networks and space 

The third session will focus on how signal-transduction networks give rise to behaviors in both space and time. Lani Wu (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas) will address the question of how human neutrophils rapidly respond to environmental changes yet ignore irrelevant fluctuations.