David Rand

Warwick Systems Biology & Mathematics Institute

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Nearly a blog

According to a definition I saw, a blog is a personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, information, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis. The stuff below is a bit too random and infrequent to satisfy that definition.

Video on Cancer Chronotherapy

21 July, 2014
Pointer

Here is a very nice video for the public explaining cancer chronotherapy which is due to Annabelle Ballesta and the team at INRIA and INSERM, including Francis Levi.

Coupling between the mamalian clock and cell cycle

19 July, 2014
News

Our paper on this appeared on 23rd June and I thought hat it would be useful to reproduce a video here that shows what 1-1 phase locking looks like in real cells with a; their stochasticity and heterogeneity.

C Feillet et al. Phase locking and multiple oscillating attractors for the coupled mammalian clock and cell cycle. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, online edition of June 23, 2014

This video shows the temporal progression of clock and cell-cycle phases for unstimulated cells in 15% Fetal bovine serum. We show the clock phase on the horizontal axis, illustrated by a bar on the top that shows the relative clock marker level. The vertical axis shows the progression of the cell cycle. The colored bar on the right-hand side illustrates the relative levels of the cell cycle markers (black to red in G1, and grey to yellow in S–G2–M). We also mark the G1–S transition and cell division as horizontal yellow lines. Cells are drawn as blue dots (turning gray once they become confluent) that move from the bottom to the top as they progress through the cell cycle, and from the left to the right according to their clock phase (in this diagram measured as the normalized time between two clock peaks). When they are connected it means that they were the two offspring of a cell that divided during the last circuit. In the background, we show an estimated vector field that indicates the mean direction cells are taking at each point in this phase space. On the sides, we show density estimates for the fraction of cells in each phase. We see that most cells follow a main stream through the middle of the image, crossing the G1–S transition and cell-division lines at a distinct mean clock phase each. Moreover, we observe that some cells skip: They leave the main stream of cells because they progress through the cell cycle phase at a slower speed and rejoin the other cells once they arrive at the main trajectory again. Note that we connect sibling cells by a dashed line when possible. The video was made by Peter Krusche.

Body Clock: What makes you tick?

19 July, 2014
Information

Great animation about the body clock on the BBC website. It's here.

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