Modularity and Crosstalk in Biomolecular Networks

Anand R. Asthagiri
Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Caltech

Stimuli as diverse as environmental stress, growth factors and cell
adhesion often utilize common intracellular signaling pathways to affect cell responses.  On one hand, these common “protocols” for information transfer offer an engineering advantage.  Developing strategies to tune core signaling modules would clearly give immediate access to re-engineer numerous stimulus-response relationships.  On the other hand, common signaling modules raise the complication that multiple stimuli must share these pathways, often simultaneously, to meet different end-objectives.  I will discuss recent progress (1) in exploiting modularity to predictably redesign regulatory circuits in yeast and mammalian cells, and (2) in understanding how natural systems exploit crosstalk to guide developmental patterning in the model organism, the C. elegans nematode.