Lectures
All lectures are prerecorded and will be posted with links on the schedule page. You should watch the lectures on or before the listed date (which is when they would be delivered if we had in-person classes).
Textbooks and reading materials
We have one strongly suggested textbook for the course:
- U. Alon, An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits, 2nd Ed., CRC Press, 2020.
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 Ed
We will use Ed for discussions on the course content and homework. You can access the class Ed page here. For matters regarding more personal issues, please contact the course staff directly via email.
Homework
We will have weekly homeworks, typically due at noon on Wednesdays. Homework must be submitted electronically by emailing them to caltech.be150@gmail.com. All individual homework problems 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 homework problem, (4.2 for example).
You have six grace days for the term. Grace days are spent as you submit late homework. For example, if you submit a homework within 24 hours of the due time, you spend one grace day, between 24 and 48 hours, you spend two, etc. Late homework will no longer be accepted after you spend your grace days. If you have legitimate reasons for homework extensions, you may write the course staff and we will grant them at our discretion. Homework extensions do not result in spent grace days.
Unless otherwise noted on a particular problem set, you may discuss homework with other students in the course. In fact, you are strongly 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.