Section: Overall Objectives

An organization into two tools and four main axes

To study these two kinds of constraints we mainly rely on two specific tools: computational cellular biochemistry and evolution models. We use these tools to develop our “artifacts” and we compare their output with real data, either direct measurements collected by experimentalists or ancestral properties computationally inferred from their extant descendants. The team research is currently organized in four main research axes. The first two ones are methodologically-oriented: we develop general formalisms and tools for computational cellular biochemistry (research axis 1) and families of models to study the evolutionary process (research axis 2). The third “NeuroCell” axis (research axis 3) is the one in which biochemical models are specifically applied on brain cells (neurons and glia). Eventually the last axis aims at integrating the two tools, computational biochemistry and evolution, in what we call "Evolutionary Systems Biology" (research axis 4). The next four sections describe these four axes in more details. The biological questions described are not the sole topics tackled by the team. They are the ones that mobilize a substantial fraction of the researchers on the long run. Many other questions are tackled by individual researchers or even small groups. In the following these ones will be briefly described in their methodological context, i.e. in the two sections devoted to research axes 1 and 2.