The cell is the basic building block of all life, and the development of methods to understand (and more important, predict) how cells "compute" decisions about their behavior would mark a major advance in our ability to understand, build and control living organisms. While most of the molecular components of the cell have been identified, the emergence of cell structure and behavior from molecular interactions remains a fundamentally mysterious process. Computer simulations, mathematical models, and quantitative measurement approaches inspired by physics are being brought to bear on the cell biological question of how cells are put together and function. But in contrast to many established fields within biology, such as biochemistry or genetics, quantitative cell biology as a field of its own is still relatively new and not strongly established. The goal of this project is to bring together disparate researchers working on quantitative approaches to the cell, to help them join into a community with its own identity and share the methods and ideas that individual researchers have developed in their own groups. This will be achieved through a variety of mechanisms that include the web-based community exchange of ideas and social coding to develop novel computational tools. Multiple focused workshops will be held as well as larger community meetings, and the support of undergraduate and graduate student interdisciplinary training will be supported through laboratory exchange visits and facilitation of their participation in workshops and conferences. The community will be inclusive of all researchers interested in furthering the goals of quantitative cell biology, and efforts will be directed towards reaching out to, inviting and supporting the participation of women and groups under-represented in the field. By bringing together researchers sharing a common interest in quantitative cell biology, using web-based activities, a series of focused workshops and laboratory exchange opportunities, this project will accelerate the pace at which this new field develops.
A fundamental unsolved problem in biology is to understand the cell as an emergent living structure resulting from thousands or millions of components working collectively; in order to achieve this, quantitative and computational approaches are required that do not currently exist. Only by re-thinking cell biology as a fully quantitative science on a par with condensed matter physics will it be possible to go beyond "one protein at a time" studies and understand how the cell as a whole is able to function. To advance this goal a series of highly interactive and focused workshops will be organized on topics that include the framework for standardization of data and algorithms for the analysis of microscope images; the challenge of scale in modeling cellular processes; the development of numerical methods and the application of information theory in cell biology; and the training of a new generation of quantitative cell biologists. Inter-disciplinary scientific laboratory exchange visits for undergraduate and graduate students will be supported, as well as the attendance of students (including especially women and groups under-represented in the field) at workshops and meetings in quantitative cell biology.
This award is supported jointly by the Cellular Dynamics and Function Cluster in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and by the Program in Mathematical Biology in the Division of Mathematical Sciences.
