On Tuesday, June 24, 2025, the University of Bucharest invites you to the lecture “Eric Davidson’s Regulatory Genome and Causality in Gene Regulatory Networks”, delivered by Professor Sorin Istrail, from the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University.
The event will take place, starting with 10:00, at the Administrative Building within the “Dimitrie Brandza” Botanical Garden (Șoseaua Cotroceni 32, Bucharest), room P04.
Interested persons are kindly asked to register by accessing the following form.
The conference, organized by the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of UB, the Faculty of Biology of UB and the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB) under the aegis of the Solomon Marcus Centenary, will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Carmen Chifiriuc, Vice-Rector for Research of the University of Bucharest.
About the conference
The presentation given by Professor Sorin Istrail, inspired by his 15-year-long collaboration with Prof. Eric Davidson, will focus on computer science contributions to the study of the regulatory genome.
As the lecturer shows, their joint study was inspired by the lifetime trailblazing research program developed by Professor Davidson, rooted in causal gene regulatory networks (GRNs), system completeness, genomic Boolean logic, and genomically encoded regulatory information. Thus, the presentation will tackle the first four inspiring questions that Eric Davidson asked, and the follow-up, namely, seven technical problems, fully or partially resolved with the methods of computer science. At the center, and unifying the intellectual backbone of those technical challenges, stands “Causality.” Their collaboration produced the causality-inferred cisGRN-Lexicon database, containing the cis-regulatory architecture (CRA) of 600+ transcription factor (TF)-encoding genes and other regulatory genes, in eight species: human, mouse, fruit fly, sea urchin, nematode, rat, chicken, and zebrafish. These CRAs are causality-inferred regulatory regions of genes, derived experimentally through the experimental method called “cis-regulatory analysis” (also known as the “Davidson criteria”). In this research program, causality challenges for computer science show up in two components: (1) how to define data structures that represent the causality-inferred, by the Davidson criteria, DNA structure data and to define a versatile software system to host them; and (2) how to identify by automated software for text analysis the experimental technical articles applying the Davidson criteria to the analysis to genes. The lecture will continue with the cisGRN-Lexicon Meta-Analysis (Part I), concluding with some reflections on epistemology and philosophy themes concerning the role of causality, logic, and proof in the emerging elegant mathematical theory and practice of the regulatory genome.
According to Professor Sorin Istrail, it is challenging to explain what “explanation” is, and to understand what “understanding” is, when the technical task is to “prove” system-level causality completeness of a 50-gene causal GRN. Within the Peter-Davidson Boolean GRN model, the Peter-Davidson completeness “theorem” provides a seminal answer: Experimental causality system completeness = Computational exact prediction completeness.
The work is the result of joint work with Eric Davidson (1937-2015), professor at California Institute of Technology.
Sorin Istrail is Julie Nguyen Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Science and former Director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown University. Before joining Brown, he was the Senior Director of Computational Biology at Celera Genomics where his group played a central role in the construction of the Sequence of the Human Genome. In 2000, he solved a long-standing open problem in statistical mechanics: the negative solution (computational intractability) of the three-dimensional Ising Model for every 3D model. He is Professor Honoris Causa of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iași, Romania.
The event is organized within the “Solomon Marcus” seminar, under the patronage of the Romanian National Commission for UNESCO and continues the series of events dedicated to the personality of Solomon Marcus on the occasion of the centenary in 2025, celebrated by the 194 UNESCO member states.
SECŢIUNE ACCESIBILIZATĂ PENTRU PERSOANELE CU DIZABILITĂŢI DE VEDERE
Postări asemănătoare:
Series of webinars and summer school on “The patient-doctor relationship in the digital era”, organized at the University of Bucharest under the aegis of CIVIS
Numitorul Comun (The Common Denominator): Actress Maia Morgenstern and Professor Liviu P. Dinu in a unique dialogue on science and art, in memory of Professor Solomon Marcus
The seminar „Talking about Mathematics and Literature: Remembering Solomon Marcus” at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest
