Abstract
Many bacteria developed a possibility to recognise aspects of theirenvironment or to communicate with each other by chemical signals.One important case is the so-called Quorum Sensing (QS), a regulatorymechanism for the gene expression. Bacteria can measure their own celldensity and the surrounding space by means of this signalling pathway. This system can be considered on different scales:The intracellular regulation system – dependent on the bacterial species –often contains several interconnected pathways, which allow for differentqualitative (and quantitative) behaviour. Furthermore, some processes underlya delay. This leads to ODE or DDE systems and we can analyse the qualitativeand quantitative behaviour and compare it to experiments in batch culture andcontinuous culture.For the description of the intercellular communication in a non-homogeneous environment e.g. a reaction-diffusion system can be used and allows the consideration of single cells in space. Also stochastic influences might influence the behaviour of such a bacterial system.
Biography
The research interests of Christina Kuttler (b. 1973) are in the field of biomathematics, especially deterministic mathematical models. She focuses in particular on modeling bacterial communications. Here, she examines intracellular regulation mechanisms and diffusion processes. She aims to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms andprovide a quantitative description. Prof. Kuttler studied mathematics, physics and computer science at the University of Tübingen. She obtained her doctorate in 2000 and did postdoctoral research at that university’s Chair of Biomathematics. After that, she worked at the Institute of Biomathematics and Biometry at the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Munich, as part of the interdisciplinary research project on molecular interactions in the rhizosphere. In 2008, Prof. Kuttler became a professor at the Technische Universität München (TUM).