UAlberta Math Biology Seminar: Alan Lindsay

Cells must reliably coordinate responses to noisy external stimuli for proper functionality. In this talk I will present a perspective on this important problem via extreme statistics. The central premise is that when a single stochastic process exhibits large variability (unreliable), the extrema of multiple processes has a remarkably tight distribution (reliable).

In this talk I will present some background on extreme statistics followed by specific applications from the dissertations of two recent students. The first case study regards antigen discrimination - the recognition by the T cell receptor of foreign antigen. The second case study concerns directional sensing - the process in which cells acquire a direction to move towards a target. In both cases, we find that extreme statistics provide new insights and corroborate experimental observations.