Presented by:
Omer Dushek
Date:
Wednesday 17th February 2016 - 15:00 to 16:00
Venue:
INI Seminar Room 2
Abstract:
Many
signalling reactions depend on the signalling protein first localising near its
substrate before catalysing a reaction. A common example is the binding of
cytosolic enzymes to the unstructured cytoplasmic tails of immune receptors.
The tethering (binding) of these enzymes to the tails of immune receptors
influences the local concentration of substrate that they experience. In
contrast to cytosolic reactions, we currently do not have experimental tools to
study tethered signalling reactions. In this work-in-progress talk, I will
present an experimental assay that we have been using to study tethered
signalling. I will show that the PDE model fails to fit the data (which is
averaged over moles of protein) whereas the equivalent stochastic simulation
can fit the data. We derived a modified PDE model based on a pair density
formalism that can fit the data and the stochastic simulation. Ultimately, we
are able to recover 4 parameters that characterise a tethered signalling
reaction from the data: binding rates, catalytic rate, and a parameter that
determines the properties of the tether.