Raphael D. Levine

Mailing Address:
Department of Chemistry
607 Charles E. Young Drive East
Mail Code 951569
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Work Address:
Geology 3608A

Research Description:

Towards theoretical systems biology and a system view of medicine we seek to provide a description of molecular -e.g., kinase-signaling networks that is intermediate between biochemical components and a global view and that highlights predictive ability. It is desired to present not only a steady state but also a time evolving portrayal of the network dynamics. The approach inherently allows for the inevitable cellular fluctuations and offers different levels of coarse graining -e.g., proteins, pathways, networks – of the description. At each level we provide the minimal set of informative constraints that recover the state of the components. Such quantitative insight into the state of diseased cells is intended to aid the development of effective diagnostics and tailored intervention. As a practical consideration, the input takes advantage of the large volumes of data produced by the current methods of systems biology. A secondary objective of our program is the use of signal transduction networks as models for robust and error correcting concatenated logic networks.