Integrating mathematical approaches into biology will produce a fundamentally new way of understanding biology from a quantitative perspective. This proposal is focused on Weber's Law as a unifying framework to study signaling and decision making at multiple scales of biological organization. This emerging design principle in biology uncovers similarities across biological scales, about how organisms, cells, and potentially molecules that form the cells sense their respective surroundings. Educating the next generation of interdisciplinary students will require integrating quantitative skills into biology teaching early on. The project emphasize the integration of research and education in order to train the next generation of scientists across several levels of education, from middle- and high-school students to undergraduate and graduate students. The undergraduate and graduate students will present their work at conferences, and they will have opportunities to author publications on their research. In addition, a Systems Biology course module developed as a result of the proposed research and teaching efforts will be disseminated through the web to nearby public school districts and community colleges.
The research will pursue the framework of Weber's Law as a design principle across biological hierarchies. Understanding cellular sensitivity to a signaling cue is a fundamental question in biology. Weber's Law describes the ability of our sensory systems to scale sensitivity logarithmically to background, mediating their dynamic range. The PI's research has uncovered evidence that Weber's Law may also govern cellular and molecular systems. The concept of Weber's Law has the potential to lead to discovery of new biological mechanisms, challenge the present paradigm of how cells signal, and raise new questions on the evolution of biological sensory mechanisms. The research will employ mathematical modeling, microscopy, and genomic engineering in order to understand how diverse biological systems maintain sensitivity to external perturbations across a large dynamic range of stimuli.
