For many organisms, timing is a literal matter of life and death: survival depends on foraging, hiding, sleeping, reproducing, and developing at the right time. Autonomous intracellular oscillators -- biological clocks -- are a remarkable solution to this problem. By providing a shared temporal reference, they coordinate processes across spatially extended systems without the need for constant costly signaling, and allow organisms to anticipate environmental changes rather than merely react. From a physicist's perspective, they also raise fascinating questions: how do living clocks generate stable rhythms from noisy molecular components, synchronize to weak environmental cues, and reliably encode information over long timescales? In this talk, I will use biological timekeeping as a framework for broader questions in physics about oscillators, entrainment, synchronization, multiscale adaptation, and the tradeoffs among precision, robustness, flexibility, and energetic cost in nonequilibrium systems. I will discuss how stochastic models of intracellular dynamics can illuminate the stability of bacterial clocks; how Kuramoto-type models of physiological synchronization can provide insights into human health; and how dynamical information can be extracted from noisy, sparsely sampled, and not-strictly-periodic time-series data.
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences
Host: Michelle Driscoll
Joan West
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