Marcella Gomez

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  In Search of General Design Principles for Collective Behavior
  Marcella Gomez
  The first wave of systems and synthetic biology has provided general network design principles that lead to robust dynamic behavior seen in nature such as adaptation, oscillations, and bi-stability.  The next frontier in this respect is finding general design principles for collective behavior of systems such as single-strain colonies with cell-to-cell communication or even multi-cellular systems. Mapping single-cell dynamics to collective behavior is not a trivial task. Some of the most well-known work includes theory developed by A. Turing for architectures leading to pattern formation. Here, I discuss a different mechanism, unique from Turing, that leads to similar patterning based on the well-known toggle switch architecture and associated properties.