Faculty of Arts & Science
Biochemistry

Email: roussel@uleth.ca

Webpage: http://people.uleth.ca/~roussel/

Research

The work of my group lies at the interface between chemistry, biology, mathematics and physics. I am interested in developing methods for modeling and simulating biochemical systems.

This raises a number of problems since cells are very different from the well-mixed dilute solutions typically studied in a lab. First of all, cellular components are often present in very small numbers, with DNA representing an extreme. This means that we can't use rate equations to model these systems, but must resort to a probabilistic theory. Second, eukaryotic cells are highly structured, being divided into compartments, most of which have inner structure of some sort. We have made some contributions to the development of stochastic (probabilistic) simulation methods.

I am also very interested in applications of these methods. We are currently developing detailed models of transcription, and we have done some work on nuclear export of RNA.

Recent Publications

Books

1. Marc R. Roussel (2012) A Life Scientist's Guide to Physical Chemistry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Refereed papers

1. Abir U. Igamberdiev and Marc R. Roussel (2012) Feedforward non-Michaelis-Menten mechanism for CO₂ uptake by Rubisco: Contribution of carbonic anhydrases and photorespiration to optimization of photosynthetic carbon assimilation. BioSystems107, 158–166.
2. Marc R. Roussel and Martin J. Slingerland (2012) A biochemically semi-detailed model of auxin-mediated vein formation in plant leaves. BioSystems109, 475–487. [Invited paper for a special issue on Biological Morphogenesis]
3. Marc R. Roussel and Terry Tang (2012) Simulation of mRNA diffusion in the nuclear environment. IET Syst. Biol.6, 125–133. [Invited paper for a special issue on ``Modelling noise in biochemical reaction networks'']
4. Maya Mincheva and Marc R. Roussel (2012) Turing-Hopf instability in biochemical reaction networks arising from pairs of subnetworks. Math. Biosci.240, 1–11.

Detailed list of publications: http://people.uleth.ca/~roussel/publications.html

Group Members (Current)

1. Catharine Roussel (Research Associate)
2. Muhammad Sajid Iqbal (PhD)
3. Tapas Barai (MSc Student)
4. Blessing Okeke (MSc Student)
5. Ryan Kung
6. RJ Murphy

Former Students

Kyle Wynnyk (Undergraduate)