Design principles of biological circuits (BE150 / BI250b)

Biological circuits of interacting genes and proteins generate an astonishing repertoire of sophisticated cellular, and multicellular, behaviors. Understanding cells requires understanding the designs of their circuits. The course has two goals. First, we seek to introduce students to powerful, fundamental principles of biological circuit design. These principles connect circuit architectures to their dynamic functions, and can be used to explain and predict cellular behaviors. Second, we seek to teach students the skills to quantitatively analyze and design biological circuits using analytical and computational tools. The course is taught from Jupyter notebooks that mix lecture notes with Python code examples. These notebooks are available on the course website. The course website is at http://be150.caltech.edu/2022/, and the notebooks are available at https://biocircuits.github.io.

Topics include feedback circuits, mechanisms for precision and robustness, the role of stochastic noise and bet-hedging, dynamic regulation, combinatorial control, and multicellular patterning. This course is co-developed and co-taught with Justin Bois.

Current Research in Biology (BI 2)

This is a seminar course in which selected faculty discuss their current research with students, over lunch.