Dr. Hana El-Samad, UC San Francisco
Understanding how cellular programs process multiple simultaneous environmental inputs is a century old problem. A classical example is that of the Monod Model, in which microorganisms that are presented with two carbon sources first consume the carbon substrate that supports the highest growth rate and then switch to the secondary carbon source. In this talk, we revisit this problem and present an interesting new twist to this classical dogma. We also discuss how progress in this project required us to formulate and study a new mathematical problem related to genomic profiling and build some synthetic circuits along the way.