Evolution of Reliable and Robust Regulatory Control

生物体的设计是可靠的，并能有力地应对环境中的意外变化。就像工程师设计的机器一样，生物体的可靠性和健壮性远非完美。在工程方面，使用时间很长并处理各种意外情况的机器非常昂贵，而且往往不太适合他们的任务-因此，工程师在设计时既考虑到了成本，也考虑到了收益。这个项目从生物学的角度考察了相同类型的设计权衡。例如，在可靠性和健壮性方面，生物体是如何设计的？在生物设计中，成本和收益之间的权衡是如何解决的？这项工作将从这些设计角度研究故障和修复的生物学例子。这些方法包括研究生物设计问题的数学和计算机模型，以及合成现实生活中的崩溃例子，如癌症、衰老，以及从分子上讲，使有机体工作的较小规模的组件。这些研究将增进对生物可靠性和稳健性的理解。这种理解将产生更广泛的影响，因为它提供了对崩溃发生时间和原因的洞察--这是疾病和衰老的根本基础。

Organisms are designed to be reliable and to deal robustly with unexpected changes in the environment. Like machines designed by engineers, the reliability and robustness of organisms is far from perfect. In engineering terms, machines that last a very long time and handle a wide variety of unexpected situations are very expensive and often poorly suited to their tasks - thus, engineers design with both costs and benefits in mind. This project examines the same sorts of design tradeoffs in biological terms. For example, how have organisms been designed with regard to reliability and robustness? How have the tradeoffs between costs and benefits been resolved in biological design? This work will study biological examples of breakdown and repair from these design perspectives. The methods include mathematical and computer models to study the problems of biological design coupled with synthesis of real-life examples of breakdown, such as cancer, aging, and, molecularly, the smaller-scale components that make organisms work. These studies will result in improved understanding of biological reliability and robustness. That understanding will have broader impacts by providing insight into when and why breakdown occurs - the fundamental basis of disease and aging.