Meet the past SIB Awards Laureates – Nacho Molina

I was a postdoc in Félix Naef's lab at EPFL when I received the award just shortly after we had published our project in Science. It was the first time that I received a price for my research and I felt deeply honoured. And, although publishing in Science was already an important way of getting recognition for my work, for me it was very special to be awarded by the Swiss community of bioinformatics, my colleagues. As I always say: scientifically speaking, I was born in Switzerland!

Back then, I was working on the development of mathematical models and computational methods to study the stochasticity of gene expression in mammalian cells. I developed a Bayesian framework combining hidden Markov models with stochastic models of biochemical reactions to analyse traces of a special luciferase reporter (Ed. note: an enzyme that produces bioluminescence and enables to track the activity of other genes) that was engineered by David Suter in Ueli Schibler’s lab in Geneva. Together, we were able to study fundamental parameters of gene transcription such as gene activation and deactivation rates or mRNA synthesis rates of endogenous promoters. Moreover, we discovered that in order to be reactivated, genes must go through a refractory period, a sort of reset period in which transcription cannot be turned on.

The main research activity in my group is to develop stochastic and biophysical models of eukaryotic gene regulation. Our work lays at the interface between bioinformatics and biophysics combining tools and methods from both fields. We develop mechanistic models of gene regulation based on both large-scale genome-wide data and single-cell imaging data. More recently, I got interested in modelling the dynamics of gene regulation in the context of the cell cycle and cell differentiation.