Evolutionary Causes and Consequences of Robustness in Developmental Systems

进化是由个体生物体大小、代谢率和抗感染能力等特征的差异推动的。这些特征通常是通过复杂的发育过程在基因和环境之间的相互作用中出现的。发育机制被广泛认为对多种遗传和环境扰动具有健壮性，但这种健壮性的原因和结果仍不清楚。这个项目的目标是调查发育系统稳健性的进化原因和结果。将构建一系列基于相互作用的基因网络的发育过程模型。这些计算模型的范围将从非常简单和抽象到日益详细和数据驱动，并将代表几个不同水平的生物组织，从基因功能和分子之间的相互作用，到细胞增殖、分化和细胞之间的相互作用，到单个生物体的形态、复杂性和适合性，并最终形成生物种群的进化。该项目的研究成果将有助于进化发育生物学定量理论的构建。这个项目将产生新的软件工具，可以用来研究进化发育生物学和相关学科中的各种问题。这些工具将在互联网上免费提供，用于学术和教育用途。这个项目将培养研究生和本科生的研究能力。休斯顿大学(UH)大约一半的学生是少数族裔，许多人是他们家庭中第一个上大学的人。来自这些典型代表不足的群体的学生将被招募参加拟议的研究。此外，该项目的跨学科性质将促进生物学家、计算机科学家、数学家和物理学家之间的合作，这些互动将加强密歇根大学网络的跨学科研究集群以及对学生的跨学科培训。最后，这项研究的结果对理解癌症等人类疾病具有长期的相关性。

Evolution is fueled by variation among individual organisms in characters such as body size, metabolic rate and resistance to infection. These characters typically emerge from an interaction between genes and environment through a complex process of development. Developmental mechanisms are widely regarded as being robust against many kinds of genetic and environmental perturbations, but the causes and consequences of this robustness are still unknown. The goal of this project is to investigate the evolutionary causes and consequences of the robustness of developmental systems. A family of models of developmental processes based on networks of interacting genes will be constructed. These computational models will range from the very simple and abstract to the increasingly detailed and data-driven, and will represent several different levels of biological organization from gene function and interactions between molecules, through cell proliferation, differentiation, and interactions between cells, to the morphology, complexity and fitness of individual organisms, and culminating in evolving populations of organisms. The results of this project will contribute to the construction of a quantitative theory of evolutionary developmental biology. This project will generate new software tools that can be used to study diverse problems in evolutionary developmental biology and related disciplines. These tools will be made freely available on the internet for academic and educational use. This project will train graduate and undergraduate students in research. Approximately half of the University of Houston (UH) students have minority status, and many are the first in their families to attend college. Students from these typically underrepresented groups will be recruited to participate in the proposed research. In addition, the interdisciplinary nature of the project will promote collaborations between biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists, and these interactions will strengthen an interdisciplinary research cluster on Networks at UH along with interdisciplinary training for students. Finally, results from this study have long term relevance for understanding human diseases such as cancer.