| Speaker | Camille Stephan-Otto Attolini |
| Title | Genotype-Phenotype Maps: from molecules to simple cells |
The study of the genotype-phenotype map has been approached in many ways and from many different disciplines. A large amount of knowledge has been produced in the field of molecular evolution as well as in development and differentiation. Nevertheless, a better understanding of the relation between the molecular level and the complexity of organisms is still far from being successful. This talk reviews some of the results on the topic and addresses questions about neutrality, plasticity and evolution in models of interacting RNA molecules as well as regulatory networks in simple cells. We found some resemblances between lower level systems and more complex layers. Neutrality may well be a result of the sequence to structure map in molecules, while plasticity is more probable achieved only when more than one layer lies between genotype and phenotype. The instability of molecular systems against parasites and in general deleterious mutations is amazingly replaced by a robustness and self regulation in higher order maps that forces to focus on modular organizations and not stoichiometric regulated systems.