Introduction to the Center

Aims

• Research: to understand in a quantitative and predictive way the complex patterns and organization that arise in living organisms at length scales from molecular to organismal.
• Education: to prepare undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students for the challenges of twenty-first century biology, which require a merging of fundamental biological understanding and methods with physical, computational, and mathematical approaches.
• Communication: to become a true Center for the study of Biocomplexity at the national and international level, providing opportunities to study and disseminate both experiment and theory at all levels. One of our main goals is to improve communication between biological, mathematical and physical scientists.
• Software and resources: to develop techniques and tools of broad utility to bioscientists and to distribute these freely to the community at large.

Research

Our long-term goal is to develop comprehensive multiscale models of cell and tissue organization and their relation to development. We address three scales of structure, starting from the level of genetic control networks and including at the subcellular level molecular machines and cytoskeletal and protein networks. At the cell level, we emphasize cell polarity and cell-cell interactions. At the supercellular level, our studies include the aggregation of cells into tissues and tissues into organs.

All projects combine quantitative experiments and computer simulations and build on the mutually complementary strength of the researchers at Notre Dame with support from our collaborators at other institutions.

• Modeling Biological Networks at the molecular level, including gene regulation pathways, transport and mechanical interactions in the cytoskeleton, and intra- and inter-cell signaling networks.
• Modeling Cellular Dynamic, including the mechanical properties of cells.
• Modeling Organogenesis and Tissue Development, including the mechanical properties of tissues.
• Population Dynamics and Ecological Systems.

December 2003 Issue of`"The Biological Physicist," ICSB Profile (PDF)