Course meetings
We have lectures from 11:00-11:50 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in 100 Broad. All students are expected to attend all course meetings. Laptops are not allowed during lecture except on lectures marked with an asterisk on the course schedule. There are many reasons why we have this policy, some of which you can read about here.
Textbooks and reading materials
We have one required textbook for the course:
- U. Alon, An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits, CRC Press, 2006.
The following books are also useful.
- D. Del Vecchio and R. M. Murray, Biomolecular Feedback Systems. This book is also a great resource. You can get PDFs from the book wiki.
- Phillips, Kondev, Theriot, and Garcia, Physical Biology of the Cell, 2nd Ed., Garland Scientific, 2012. This book has good analysis of physical bases for the regulation of gene expression.
- S. Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, And Engineering, 2nd Ed., Westview Press, 2014. This book gives a good pedagogical background on the analysis of dynamical systems.
Email and Piazza
We will use Piazza for discussions on the homework. You will need a Piazza account, and can access the class Piazza page here. Piazza should be used to discuss course content. For matters regarding more personal issues, such as homework extensions due to illness, please contact the course staff directly via email.
Homework
We will have weekly homeworks, typically due at 12:01 AM on Wednesdays, Homework must be submitted electronically by emailing them to caltech.be150@gmail.com. All homeworks must be submitted as a Jupyter notebook and also an HTML conversion of the notebook. You may hand-write and scan portions of these homeworks and include the scans in your Jupyter notebook. Naturally, everything must be legible. You may also need to submit image files, for example if you scan hand-written notes. All files must be submitted as a single ZIP file. The name of the document must be lastname_firstname_#.zip, where # is the number of the assignment.
Late homework is accepted with a 10% deduction for each day it is late. For example, if a homework is due at 12:01 AM on Wednesday, you can receive a maximum of 90% of the points if it is turned in between the then and 12:00 AM on Thursday. After five days, the homework will not be accepted.
Unless otherwise noted on a particular problem set, you may discuss homework with other students in the course. In fact, you are encouraged to do so. Naturally, the submitted homework must be your own original work.
Of course, you may not refer to homework materials from previous editions of this course.
Grading
Your final grade will be determined from your homework.