Mike Ferry
Graduate Student
B.S., Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology, University of California Los
Angeles, 2002
Email: msferry AT ucsd.edu
Phone: 858.361.5515
Biography/Research Profile:
My research is focused on understanding circadian rhythms in the filamentous
fungus, Neurospora crassa. Circadian rhythms are found in all eukaryotes and
in humans are responsible for our sleep wake cycles. We are interested in
the genetic circuit that drives the circadian oscillator, since a reliable
artificial oscillating genetic circuit has proved challenging to construct.
We seek to gain a deeper understanding of the circadian oscillator through
both quantitative modeling and experimental efforts. Our work involves collaborations
between experimental biologists, engineers and theoretical physicists.
Experimentally we wish to monitor quantitatively how the levels of the various
clock components vary in time and how interactions between these molecules
can shift the phase of the clock. Neurospora is an excellent organism to perform
these experiments since it has been well characterized genetically, has excellent
molecular tools available and can be grown in our microfluidic devices. Quantitatively
we wish to develop a detailed model which can describe how the clock is robust
to variability in the amount of its core components. In this regard we seek
to describe the oscillator with a series of ordinary differential equations
which can be evaluated numerically to yield experimentally testable predictions
governing the time progression of the oscillator.
