Aims and Scope

The main theme of the school is the mathematical analysis of models of information transmission in living cells and macrosopic populations.

Living cells store and transmit information. Their proper functioning depends on the optimal and robust information transmission through intricate signaling pathways. Such pathways consist of many biochemical reactions, products of some of them activate or repress other reactions giving rise to feedback loops. Biochemical reactions may be modeled by Markov jump processes. Investigation of stationary states of coupled stochastic processes describing small cellular modules such as gene expression and regulation, phosphorylation cycles, existence of bi-stabilities, cycles, and bifurcations will help us to understand and predict behavior of cells. It is important to view biochemical processes in the framework of information transmission in open non-equilibrium systems. It is clear that to achieve progress in developing a theory of such biological systems, an interdisciplinary approach and collaboration of mathematicians, statisticians, biologists, and physicists is needed.

The aim of the school is two-fold. First of all we plan to gather in Bedlewo the leading international experts working on various aspects of information transmission to give introductory lectures and to present the state-of-the-art in their fields. We hope that participants will start new collaborations, establishing working groups. We would also like to attract young people to this area of research. This can be possibly achieved by offering them work projects. We hope to be able to organize a meeting of a working group in the following year.