Systems biology of transcription and splicing in yeast

Transcription produces RNA from DNA, and this information is subsequently translated into protein. Transcription is a complex process involving the removal of non-coding sequences (introns). This editing operation is known as splicing, and is responsible for the generation of 100K proteins from only 20K genes in human. Defects in splicing are linked with disease, and hence it is important to understand this process fully. This talk will introduce the biological background and present stochastic models of transcription and splicing. Stochastic simulation and optimisation methods and results will also be presented. This work is a collaboration with the Beggs lab and the Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh.