The noise is the signal: what can we learn from fluctuations in living systems

Achtung, dieser Vortrag wird auf Englich gehalten

Inhalt:

Living organisms are inherently out of equilibrium. At cellular and subcellar length scales, these systems are subject to intrinsic noise. Nonetheless, cells reliably perform vital functions. A constant consumption and dissipation of energy results in non-equilibrium activity, which lies at the heart of many biological functionalities. These non-equilibrium dynamics manifests over a broad range of scales: from the power strokes of a molecular motor, to cytoplasmic fluctuations and beating flagella, all the way to migrating cells. By observing the dynamics of such systems, we obtain stochastic trajectories. What do these noisy trajectories teach us about the underlying physics of the system?

In the first part, I will discuss how to extract information from steady-state fluctuations in active biological assemblies. Specifically, I will show how we can tell that a system is out of equilibrium, just by observing it. We can even provide a measure of how far the system is out of equilibrium. In the second part of this talk, we consider trajectories of whole cells to unravel the features of their dynamics. Specifically, we study the stochastic dynamics of cells migrating across a physical obstacle in a confining micropattern. This data-driven approach reveals that such confined cells exhibit intricate non-linear dynamics.