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Naama Barkai Lab

 

Department of Molecular Genetics

Weizmann Institute of Science

 

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Design principles

of biological circuits

Cells are constantly "making decisions" - monitoring their environment, modulating their metabolism and 'deciding' whether to divide, differentiate or die. For this, they use biochemical circuits composed of interacting genes and proteins. Advances over the past decades have mapped many of these circuits. Still, can we infer the underlying logic from the detailed circuit structure? Can we deduce the selection forces that shaped these circuits during evolution? What are the principles that govern the design and function of these circuits and how similar or different are they from principles that guide the design of man-made machines? The interplay between variability and robustness is a hallmark of biological computation: Biological systems are inherently noisy, yet control their behavior precisely. Research projects in our lab quantify biological variability and identify its genetic origins, examine how variability is buffered by molecular circuits and investigate whether variability can in fact be employed to improve cellular computation. We encourage a multi-disciplinary approach, combining wet-lab experiments, dynamic-system theory and computational data analysis. This is achieved through fruitful interactions between students with backgrounds in physics, biology, computer science, mathematics and chemistry.

Featured Article

April 
2023

Complementary strategies for directing in vivo transcription factor binding through DNA binding domains and intrinsically disordered regions

Divya Krishna Kumar*, Felix Jonas*, Tamar Jana, Sagie Brodsky, Miri Carmi & Naama Barkai

Molecular Cell (2023,sharelink) | PDF(preprint)

DNA binding domains (DBDs) of transcription factors (TFs) recognize DNA sequence motifs that are highly abundant in genomes. Within cells, TFs bind a subset of motif-containing sites as directed by either their DBDs or DBD-external (nonDBD) sequences. To define the relative roles of DBDs and nonDBDs in directing binding preferences, we compared the genome-wide binding of 48 (∼30%) budding yeast TFs with their DBD-only, nonDBD-truncated, and nonDBD-only mutants. With a few exceptions, binding locations differed between DBDs and TFs, resulting from the cumulative action of multiple determinants mapped mostly to disordered nonDBD regions. Furthermore, TFs’ preferences for promoters of the fuzzy nucleosome architecture were lost in DBD-only mutants, whose binding spread across promoters, implicating nonDBDs’ preferences in this hallmark of budding yeast regulatory design. We conclude that DBDs and nonDBDs employ complementary DNA-targeting strategies, whose balance defines TF binding specificity along genomes.

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Departmental retreat movie 2017
Lab pictures
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