Time

Oct 18 2012 - 1:50pm - 2:45 pm

Location

MW 154

Speaker

Xinfeng Liu (University of South Carolina)

Abstract

Scaffold, a class of proteins, plays many important roles in signal transduction. Through studying various models of scaffold, I will show novel regulations induced by scaffold binding in a multisite phosphorylation system and with scaffold's spatial localization. To efficiently compute the models, we introduce a new class of fast numerical algorithm incorporated with adaptive mesh refinement and WENO scheme for solving the stiff systems with spatial dynamics. Finally, I shall also introduce mathematical modeling for the dynamical interaction between cancer stem cells (CSCs) and non-stem cancer cells, and our findings reveal that two negative feedback loops are critical in controlling the balance between the population of CSCs and that of non-stem cancer cells. Furthermore, the model with negative feedback suggests that overexpression of the oncogene HER2 leads to an increase of CSCs by regulating the division mode or proliferation rate of CSCs.