Luonan Chen
Executive Director and Professor, Key Laboratory of Systems Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Friday, May 24, 2013
11:00am
Rowland Hall, Rm 440R
Abrupt state changes exist during many biological processes, e.g., cell differentiation process, proliferation process, or even disease deterioration process. Such dynamics generally signal the emergence of critical transition phenomena, which result in drastic changes in system states or eventually qualitative changes in phenotypes. Hence, it is of great importance to detect such transitions and further reveal their molecular mechanism.
We developed a new model-free method by exploiting BIG biological DATA, i.e., dynamical network biomarkers (DNBs), which can identify not only early-warning signals of the critical transitions but also their leading networks, which drive the whole system to initiate such transitions. Examples for complex diseases are provided to detect pre-disease stages for which traditional methods failed, for demonstrating the effectiveness of this novel approach.