InKomBio: Evolutive adaptation with Escherichia coli

Evolution is the process of adaptation of organisms to their respective environment by permanent genetic alterations. Evolutive adaptation proceeds by stochastic mutations and selection of the fittest individuals. A basic problem is to understand how a population of organisms adapts to an environment. Mutations are stochastic events on the molecular level that lead to a change of the intracellular information channels from transcription factors to genes and metabolic fluxes. For this reason a communication theoretic approach is promising. The main goal of this project is the information theoretic characterisation and analysis of the intracellular information exchange during evolutive adaptation at the example of Escherichia coli populations. An information theoretic model of a cell population is a complex communication system where the inputs and outputs are stochastic variables, namely, transcription factor activities, gene expression, and metabolic fluxes. A cell population is considered in order to be able to model population averaged measurements. This theoretical model will be developed and iteratively adapted to experiments on the time scale of several hundred generations in a well defined environment for Escherichia coli. The experiments are based on a well established platform which was built up by the ISYS and the IMB and was and is used for other projects, too.