本校榮幸邀請英國愛丁堡大學Assistant Professor Filippo Menolascina蒞臨成大演講。Dr. Menolascina 結合電機資訊的背景與其他生物學家的團隊一起研究細胞的奧秘，講題為< Controlling life, one cell at a time >。歡迎各位有興趣的師生參加。機會難得!

日期 : 105年12月6日
時間 : 15:10
地點 : 自強校區機械大樓 三星講堂

Abstract:
With the recent demonstration of real-time gene networks control in-vivo, new opportunities became available to Control Engineers to contribute to the development of new and exciting results at the boundary of Systems and Synthetic Biology. In this talk I will discuss how I took advantage of the lessons learnt while working on the control of synthetic gene circuits to regulate a bacterial behavioural trait stemming from a well-known signaling pathway, namely aerotaxis (i.e. the migration of microorganisms in response to oxygen gradients). To this aim I will first present two modelling approaches I used to quantitatively describe this behaviour starting from high-throughput experimental data: (a) one based on Systems Identification principles and (b) the other deeply rooted in the biophysics of the intracellular signal transduction that mediates aerotaxis in my model system, i.e. Bacillus subtilis. I will then show how the information obtained in this process enabled both (a) the discovery of a peculiar dynamical property (i.e. logarithmic-sensing) B. subtilis might use to optimize its search for oxygen and (b) to achieve in-vivo positioning control of bacterial populations in microfluidic devices. I will then conclude discussing some of the efforts currently ongoing in my group to expand these results and adapt the closed loop approach I previously developed to implement a real-time model-discrimination algorithm in-vivo.

Bio:
After obtaining his B.Sc.(2006) and M.Sc.(2008) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Polytechnic of Bari, Dr. Filippo Menolascina joined Prof. Diego di Bernardo’s group at the TeleThon Institute of Genetics and Medicine-University of Naples. Here Dr. Menolascina obtained his PhD in 2012 defending a thesis that demonstrated how classical control principles could be used to tightly regulate over time the concentration of a target protein in a complex synthetic gene network in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. With the intent of extending these results from biological circuits to the behaviours emerging from them, Dr. Menolascina joined Prof. Roman Stocker’s laboratory at MIT where, in collaboration with Prof. Eduardo Sontag at Rutgers, he worked on the modelling and control of bacterial motility both in soil and marine environments. In 2015 Dr. Menolascina joined the the University of Edinburgh as Assistant Professor in the Systems and Synthetic Biology Centre/Institute for Bioengineering: here his group combines theory and simulations with experiments in microfluidics/microscopy to automatically model and control biological systems -with a particular emphasis on the development of closed-loop in-vivo optimal experimental design strategies to enable “ultra-rapid prototyping” in Synthetic Biology.

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Esteemed Professors,

I have the great pleasure of hosting Chancellor’s Fellow - Assistant Professor Filippo Menolascina, Ph.D. from Institute for Bioengineering, University of Edinburgh. He will at 15:10 on Tuesday 6th of December 2016 give us a lecture on "Controlling life, one cell at a time" in the San-Shing Auditorium on the 1st floor of the Mechanical Engineering Department of NCKU. The abstract and bio is below. He is doing some very interesting work on Synthetic Biology and is a close collaborator of mine. I would be honored if you could attend.

Best wishes,
Martin

Torbjörn Nordling, Ass. Prof., Ph.D., M.Sc.
Principal Investigator
www.nordlinglab.org