Van Oudenaarden Lab

Welcome to the van Oudenaarden Lab homepage, hosted by OpenWetWare. Also check out our other lab web-site

Email: avano@mit.edu

Phone: (617) 253-4446

Fax: (617) 258-6883

Address:

77 Massachusetts Ave.

Bldg. 68-371B (Office)

Bldg. 68-365, 68-359, 68-383 (Labs)

Cambridge, MA 02139

Mission
Living systems are intrinsically noisy. Surprisingly, the functioning of a living organism is not significantly hindered by these random fluctuations. Biological cells can even exploit noise by deliberately introducing diversity into a population. In these cases noise is not a nuisance, but essential for survival. Advances in modern biochemistry and genetics have led to a detailed understanding of the molecular machinery involved in gene expression, and the constant flow of data from the Genome Project has enabled the identification of more and more genes. A millennial challenge is to quantitatively understand how different genes and their regulating proteins are grouped together in genetic circuits, and how stochastic fluctuations influence gene expression in these complex systems. In our group we focus on the importance of noise in the expression of genes by using both experimental and theoretical approaches.

Recent Publications
For our recent publications click here

Lab members
For information on our lab members click here