Center for Systems and Engineering Immunology Seminar Series

Abstract: Complex biological systems, from microbial communities to gene regulatory networks, can be represented as tangled networks of many interacting elements. Understanding these networks is key to understanding their dynamics and developing control strategies. However, reliable reconstruction of such large networks is a very challenging task, especially where the available data is limited. In my talk, I will review recent studies where we developed and applied a top-down approach to studying microbial networks, such as the `universality’ of their dynamics, their `effective connectivity' and its relation to May's stability criterion, detection of keystones, and analysis of single-time-point microbial samples. I will also briefly discuss an application of top-down approach to evaluate the average gene-to-gene coordination from scRNA-seq data.