Abstract:
The talk gives a brief introduction into the superfamily of nuclear receptors and the main drugs that activate them. A number of nuclear receptors plays a role in the regulation of circadian and other periodic biologic processes. The feedback-loop based mechanism of gene induction leading to such periodic processes is discussed and a corresponding mathematical model is presented. An ODE and a PDE version of the model are compared and parameter ranges are given for which the model predicts oscillatory behavior. The relation with physically meaningful parameter values is discussed.
