Undergraduate Minicourses in Mathematics

Gene regulatory networks are ubiquitous in molecular systems biology and contribute to the control of major biological processes including metabolism and development. Given the abundance of gene data sets, the ability to reconstruct the regulatory network underlying the data has become one of the prime objectives in systems biology research. We will introduce various methods for inferring the structure of gene regulatory networks. These methods use techniques from algebraic geometry to build models of polynomial dynamical systems, which provide a rich backdrop within which to perform network analyses. We will demonstrate the use of the methods with a Macaulay 2 based web application.