Center Seminars & Workshops

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) plays a fundamental role in cell respiration and the maintenance of eukaryotic life. However, respiration also requires proteins encoded in the nuclear DNA (nDNA), leading to an intricate interaction and co-evolution of these two genetic sequences. Maintaining compatibility between proteins from the nucleus and mitochondria is essential for proper cell function. Understanding how this compatibility persists over time, despite the susceptibility of mtDNA to accumulate harmful mutations, is of great importance. Mechanisms like purifying selection in mtDNA and compensatory mutations in nDNA have been proposed and scrutinized. In this talk, I will present an individual-based model that elucidates the timing and mechanisms of these processes. We show that not only the mtDNA mutation rate plays a role in the process but also the strength of mito-nuclear selection and the initial degree of incompatibility.

Machine Learning (ML) aims at extracting information and knowledge from data. ML is naturally interdisciplinary, as it bridges fundamental techniques of data analysis, typically developed by mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists, with the needs of actionable insights that are specific to the particular application domain. Mechanism-driven models are based on the principles of physics and physiology and allow for identification of cause-to-effect relationships among interplaying factors in a complex system. While invaluable for causality, mechanism-driven models are often based on simplifying assumptions to make them tractable for analysis and simulation; however, this often brings into question their relevance beyond theoretical explorations. The combination of mechanism-driven and data-driven models allows us to harness the advantages of both approaches, as mechanism-driven models excel at interpretability but suffer from a lack of scalability, while data-driven models are excellent at scale but suffer in terms of generalizability and insights for hypothesis generation. This combined, integrative approach represents the pillar of the interdisciplinary approach to data science that will be discussed in this talk, with applications spanning from glaucoma research to cardiovascular monitoring and physiology of the lower urinary tract (LUT).