ALEXANDER VAN OUDENAARDEN,
Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and
Associate Professor of Physics
Research Interests
I. Genetic Noise and Networks
Living systems are intrinsically noisy. Surprisingly, the functioning
of a living organism is not significantly hindered by these random
fluctuations. Biological cells can even exploit noise by deliberately
introducing diversity into a population. In these cases noise is
not a nuisance, but essential for survival. Advances in modern biochemistry
and genetics have led to a detailed understanding of the molecular
machinery involved in gene expression, and the constant flow of
data from the Genome Project has enabled the identification of more
and more genes. A millennial challenge is to quantitatively understand
how different genes and their regulating proteins are grouped together
in genetic circuits, and how stochastic fluctuations influence gene
expression in these complex systems. In our group we focus on the
importance of noise in the expression of genes by using both experimental
and theoretical approaches.
II. Biological Forces and Motion
Understanding how small-scale biochemical interactions generate
large-scale organization and cellular structure is a central problem
in cell biology. We address this problem in our study of the actin
cytoskeleton in biological cells. Individual actin filaments randomly
grow or shrink, but a polymerizing, self-organized network of filaments
is capable of exerting significant mechanical forces which can be
used by biological cells to change shape or move. We use biological
and biologically-derived synthetic systems to probe the relation
between actin polymerization and force generation.
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Biographical Sketch
Forthcoming.
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Selected Publications
M. Thattai and A. van Oudenaarden, Attenuation
of noise in ultrasensitive signaling cascades, Biophysical Journal 82, 2943 (2002).
E. Ozbudak, M. Thattai, I. Kurtser, A. D. Grossman and A. van Oudenaarden, Regulation
of noise in the expression of a single gene, Nature Genetics 31, 69 (2002). (See also the accompanying News
& Views article.)
M. Thattai and A. van Oudenaarden, Intrinsic
noise in gene regulatory networks, PNAS 98, 8614 (2001).
A. van Oudenaarden and J. A. Theriot, Cooperative
symmetry breaking by actin filament polymerization in a model for
cell motility, Nature Cell Biology 1, 493 (1999). (See
also the accompanying News
& Views article.)
L. A. Cameron, M. J. Footer, A. van Oudenaarden, and J. A. Theriot, Motility
of ActA protein-coated microspheres driven by actin polymerization,
PNAS 96, 4908 (1999)
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