All living organisms can initiate distinct developmental programs
depending on the presence of specific external cues. Such cues are
used to regulate a variety of cellular behaviors including metabolism,
gene expression, cell division, cell motility, differentiation, and
death. A common property of signal transduction systems is that they
often function transiently in the face of an unchanging initial
stimulus. Despite the importance of temporal regulation in signaling,
the underlying mechanisms leading to transient pathway activation are
often poorly understood. In this talk, I will provide a brief
introduction to intracellular signal transduction. I will then present
two examples in which a combination of computational and experimental
analysis is used to investigate the biochemical mechanisms that
underlie pathway desensitization. The first example involves
G-protein-coupled receptor signaling and the second focuses on the
high osmolarity glycerol response pathway in yeast. These studies are
used to motivate a mathematical analysis of several different
mechanisms of pathway desensitization.
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