Department of Mathematics

Speaker: Felix Lieder
Title: Survival of the Smartest: Sparse Recovery in Biology
Affiliation: University of Düsseldorf
Date: Friday, September 24, 2015
Place and Time: Room 204-B, Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm

Abstract. Survival can be tough: Exposing a bacterial strain to new environments will typically lead to oneof two possible outcomes. First, not surprisingly, the stain simply dies; second the stain adapts inorder to survive. In this talk we are concerned with the hardness of survival, i.e. what is the most efficient (smartest) way to adapt to new environments? How many new abilities does a bacteriumneed in order to survive? Here we restrict our focus on two specific bacteria, namely E. coli and Buchnera. In order to answer the questions raised, we first model the underlying problem as an NP-hard decision problem. Using a re-weighted l1-regularization approach, well known from imag ereconstruction, we then approximate "good" solutions. A numerical comparison between these "good" solutions and the "exact" solutions concludes the talk.