Biological & Soft Matter Seminar: Resetting in biology

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88904888353?pwd=dDIwaXRxSjlsVElkR0dXdTNPTGhnZz09

Abstract: 

Changes are inevitable in nature, and those that are most dramatic, with often drastic consequences, are the ones that occur all of a sudden. 

Many nonequilibrium processes that are essential in life involve incremental changes subject to noise (diffusion) punctuated by sudden changes (resetting). Quantifying exact statistics of the so-called diffusion processes with stochastic resetting has become the bread and the butter of dozens of colleagues, yet its implications of such results to real biological systems is yet an open area of research.

In this talk I will present recent theoretical results that are fruits of the application of the stochastic resetting framework to real biological systems. Namely I will focus on two examples: (i) fluctuations of RNA polymerases during transcriptional pauses [1-2]; and (ii) resetting of therapies for antiviral chronic diseases, e.g. HIV [3].  

For the case of RNA polymerases backtracking, special emphasis will be given to the experimental verification of our theoretical predictions at the single-molecule level, and their implications to genetic proofreading. Furthermore, I will present fruitful theoretical approaches that we developed tackling these biological processes, including a path integral approach [4] which revealed pitfalls of stochastic resetting when considering closed, periodic boundary geometries [5].

[1] A Lisica, C Engel, M Jahnel, É Roldán, EA Galburt, P Cramer, SW Grill PNAS 113 (11), 2946-2951 (2016)

[2] É Roldán, A Lisica, D Sánchez-Taltavull, SW Grill Physical Review E 93 (6), 062411 (2016)

[3] AM Ramoso, JA Magalang, D Sánchez-Taltavull, JP Esguerra, É Roldán arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.06686 (2020)

[4] É Roldán, S Gupta Physical Review E 96 (2), 022130 (2016)

[5]  G Tucci, A Gambassi, S Gupta, É Roldán Phys. Rev. Research 2, 043138 (2020)