Discovering the Rules of Regulation in Biology’s Best Understood Organism

Abstract:  The ability to read the DNA sequences of different organisms has transformed biology in much the same way that the telescope transformed astronomy.  At this point, the amount of sequence information we have gathered contains more letters than 1.5 billion copies of the complete works of Shakespeare.  And yet, much of the sequence found in these genomes is as enigmatic as the Rosetta Stone was to early Egyptologists.  This talk will describe unexpected ways of using the physics of information transfer first developed at Bell Labs for thinking about telephone communications to look into genomes and to try and understand their meaning. Specifically, I ask how it can be that after half a century of molecular biology, we still know nothing at all about how more than  half the genes in the “simplest” of organisms, the gut bacterium E. coli, are regulated.  The work I will describe attempts to define what it would look like to declare understanding and how we can use ideas from statistical physics to reach that objective.