Prof. Nadav (Nadi) Skjøndal-Bar
Associate Professor
Department Chemical Engineering
NTNU
NO-7491 Trondheim
Norway

The presentation on Tuesdayday, August 23, 2011, starting at 4 p.m., takes place at the FEIT Faculty Room G09-211

Gastrin is a hormone, mainly produced by G-cells in response to food, and is under feedback regulation. Gastrin activates and stimulates processes in the stomach and gut, including growth of specific cells in these tissues. Wrong regulation of Gastrin can result for example in cancer tumours. The study of processes involved Gastrin can assist in a solution for many cancer types. We aim at understanding the topology, the dynamics and the mechanisms of the gastrin network using a large microarray dataset we generated. Many decomposition methods are available to extract hidden regulatory signals from the high-throughput data sets, such as Principal component analysis (PCA), Independent component analysis (ICA), Singular value decomposition method (SVD). These methods can reduce the dimensionality of data but fails to extract the biologically significant information. Network Component Analysis (NCA) makes use of available information on the system from experiments and the extracted signals are biologically significant. Using the NCA we manage the estimate kinetic data of many TF's involved in the process and characterize them according to early-late response in gene expression. Through an extension of the NCA method, we manage to constract a network topology of the key TFs in the process.

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Mr. Nadav Skøndal-Bar is an Associate Professor for Systems Biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Trondheim since 2008. His B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering he received from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering he received from the NTNU. In 2002 he started as a research assistant at NTNU (Department of Engineering Cybernetics), followed by a lecturer position in 2007, before he became an associate Professor in Systems Biology in 2008. Research Interests:

• Bio-systems Modelling, Analysis and Control: the application of systems engineering principles to the analysis of regulatory mechanisms in biological systems
• Modelling, analysis and control of gene regulatory networks in the protein synthesis and degradation
• Modelling, analysis and control of whole body growth in lower vertebrates
• Nonlinear systems analysis and control

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