The international workshop, "Cellular Decision Making", co-sponsored by NSF/USA, EPSRC/UK, and CIFAR/Canada to be held in Arlington, VA on April 19-21, 2010 will discuss state-of-the-art techniques for both the measurement and modeling of cellular decision processes and the challenges that lie ahead. Progress in these areas will provide a predictive foundation for how complex living systems operate. It will bring together the leading experts from the biological and physical sciences to present and discuss research in the following four key areas that address the following fundamental areas. 1. Cellular decision processes studied at the single cell level in real time. 2. Reducing biological decision-making machinery to simpler modules.3. Quantitatively modeling biological decision processes. 4. Role of stochasticity within biological processes. The meeting is sponsored by the Physics and the Molecular Cell Biology Divisions at NSF.
A workshop on Cellular Decision Making was held in Arlington VA April 19-21 2010 between researchers from the US, UK/Europe, and Canada. The workshop noted that cells are complex systems, subject to stochastic fluctuations, that constantly make decisions and adjust their behavior as their environment alters. The workshop alos noted that decisions made by cells are determined by biochemical networks that respond to noisy input signals and generate chemical outputs driving physiological changes. Many of the workshop speakers noted that for a cell to make an appropriate decision it must be able to measure, store and process noisy chemical information. This lead to discussion of fundamental questions regarding cellular decisions, including: Do physical constraints place limits on the types of calculations that a cell can make? Do these constraints lead to common design principles that are re-utilized in cellular computations across cell types? Can we understand and predict how the interacting molecular parts generate the required computations? To what extent is it possible to break down the complex cellular calculations into more easily understood component processes? The workshop participants discussed several potential approaches to address these questions, focusing primarily on the role of stochastic noise, including: single-cell level time-lapse studies, synthetic biology approaches to study reduced/simplified versions of natural biological decision making circuits, and mathematical and quantitative modeling, There was broad consensus regarding the important (and likely critical) role of stochastic noise in cellular decision processes in many systems. Many participants noted that stochastic noise in cellular processes is understudied in many cellular processes (especially human and mammalian systems) and should become a priority. The workshop generated numerous new collaborations between researchers studying stochastic noise in cellular decisions. A number of followup meetings to discuss research progress on the role of stochastic noise have occured.
