Collaborative Research: Nonlocal Interfaces in Biological Systems

合作研究：生物系统中的非局部接口

• 批准号: 1813645
• 负责人: James von Brecht
• 金额: $ 6.16万
• 依托单位: California State University-Long Beach Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-08-15 至 2021-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1813645&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Nonlocal; Interfaces; Biological

This award supports the development of mathematical tools for understanding phenomena caused by the interactions among biological interfaces. An interface is a transition between regions in a system, each exhibiting different biological properties. The natural world displays a vast gallery of organized systems characterized by complex interface dynamics, including the edges of growing tumors or bacterial colonies, the surface of a growing, hollow embryo, or the transition region between high and low electrical activity in a beating heart. This project will investigate biological systems that involve interfaces with interactions on long length-scales; the behaviors of these interfaces have properties which cannot be predicted by purely local dynamics, as when a bubble popping far away allows other bubbles to grow. The new tools developed will be validated through experimentation with bacterial biofilms and human organoids. Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in the research at both California State University-Long Beach and Montana State University, and Native American students will be recruited using collaborative outreach programs in existence at Montana State University.The investigation will focus on studying complex systems characterized by a collection of mutually interacting curves or surfaces. These nonlocal mutual interactions can produce a variety of pattern forming behaviors that typically do not occur in classical interfacial models. For example, nonlocal interfacial models exhibit arrested fronts, which are stationary, dynamically stable interfaces between quasi-homogeneous regions in a complex system. The interactions between certain strains of bacteria provide a concrete instance of such fronts. The evolution of genetically identical sibling colonies lead to competition between these colonies, and this competition produces a collection of mutually interacting interfaces (i.e. the boundary of each colony) that eventually arrest in regions of sibling-sibling competition. The project will introduce a first-principle modeling framework for nonlocal interfaces that offers reduced model complexity from both an analytical and computational perspective. Despite the relative simplicity of this framework, its specific instances still capture the essential pattern forming mechanisms in a variety of biological systems. As a consequence, research under the award will focus on validating this overall approach via experimental predictions in several biological systems. This approach to understanding nonlocal pattern formation appears new at the level of generality introduced in the project, and it opens the door to numerous explorations of the mathematical behavior of the framework and of its applications for different experimental systems. The major aim is to provide researchers with a comparatively flexible, minimalistic framework to study arrested fronts and other interfacial phenomena.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该奖项支持开发数学工具来理解生物界面之间相互作用引起的现象。界面是系统中区域之间的过渡，每个区域表现出不同的生物学特性。自然世界展示了一个巨大的有组织系统，其特征是复杂的界面动力学，包括生长的肿瘤或细菌菌落的边缘、生长的中空胚胎的表面，或者跳动的心脏中高电活动和低电活动之间的过渡区域。该项目将研究涉及长尺度相互作用界面的生物系统；这些界面的行为具有无法通过纯粹的局部动力学来预测的属性，就像当一个气泡在远处破裂时会允许其他气泡生长一样。开发的新工具将通过细菌生物膜和人体类器官的实验进行验证。 加州州立大学长滩分校和蒙大拿州立大学的本科生和研究生将参与这项研究，美国原住民学生将利用蒙大拿州立大学现有的合作外展项目来招募。这项调查将重点研究以一系列相互作用的曲线或曲面为特征的复杂系统。这些非局部相互作用可以产生多种模式形成行为，这些行为通常不会发生在经典界面模型中。例如，非局部界面模型表现出捕获前沿，这是复杂系统中准同质区域之间的静态、动态稳定的界面。某些细菌菌株之间的相互作用提供了此类前沿的具体实例。基因相同的兄弟群体的进化导致这些群体之间的竞争，这种竞争产生了一系列相互作用的界面（即每个群体的边界），最终在兄弟姐妹竞争的区域中停止。该项目将为非局部接口引入第一原理建模框架，从分析和计算的角度降低模型复杂性。尽管该框架相对简单，但其具体实例仍然捕获了各种生物系统中基本的模式形成机制。因此，该奖项的研究将侧重于通过在几个生物系统中进行实验预测来验证这一总体方法。这种理解非局部模式形成的方法在项目中引入的通用性水平上显得很新，并且它为对该框架的数学行为及其在不同实验系统中的应用进行大量探索打开了大门。主要目的是为研究人员提供一个相对灵活、简约的框架来研究捕获前沿和其他界面现象。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。