Theoretical Biology

Biology and medicine are exciting topics and a quantitative approach to tackle them requires some considerable efforts. This module comprises three parts: Cellular Biology; Populaitonal Genetics and Neuroscience; three major and seemly very different topics in biology. From mathematical perspectives, the module requires a solid knowledge in dynamical systems, probability, statistics, stochastic processes and game theory etc. For each part, we have one running example and one standard example which will help you understand the materials which I cover in lectures. At the end of our module, at least some of you will be able to work on theoretical biology yourself. This is obviously an ambitious attempt and I hope that all of you will enjoy our summer school.

Part I. CELLULAR BIOLOGY, we cover Chapter 5, 6 and 7 of the following book. The standard example is from a Cell paper last year: A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype and its supplemental material.

                 

Part II. POPULATION GENETICS, we cover the first three chapters of the following book, with a standard example from NeuroImage, 2012, Increasing Power for Voxel-wise Genome-wide Association Studies: The Random Field Theory, Least Square Kernel Machines and Fast Permutation Procedures with materials on random field theory.

                 

Part III. NEUROSCIENCE, for 5 hours, we will cover some important topics in neuroscience, with a standard example from PLoS Comp Biol, 2008, Synchronous bursting of oxytocin neurons; emergent behaviour of a model, with mathematical analyses and a more biologically oriented review.

                 

References: 1. Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life, Martin A. Nowak, Harvard Univ Press, 2009 (has been translated into Chinese)

More references will be distributed during lectures. Bon Voyage!