Center for Quantitative Biology

定量生物学中心的总体目标是在普林斯顿建立一个研究和教学环境，充分满足实践有用的定量生物科学的挑战和机会。该中心将增加来自不同学科和部门（包括分子生物学，生态学和进化生物学，计算机科学，化学工程和物理学）的研究人员之间的交流带宽，其中一些人已经在定量项目上合作，另一些人正在计划这样做。对于本科生和研究生，该中心将提供一个多学科教学和学习的新方式的重点，其中定量和生物从一开始就被整合。目标是提供一种教育，使学生在生物学和定量概念方面具有同等的能力。具体目标是：（1）发展生物过程的现实和定量模型;（2）收集全面描述生物过程的大规模数据集。(3)设计新的和改进的方法计算分析和显示复杂的模型，结构和数据;（4）在普林斯顿大学建立新的课程和课程的定量生物学教育的本科生，研究生，和更大的科学界;以及（5）将这些想法在几个合作和多学科项目中付诸实践，每一个都针对（i）发育过程中的空间模式;（ii）细胞内信号传导和转录网络;以及（iii）病毒-宿主相互作用的主题领域中的特定生物学问题。所有这些项目都有共同的定量目标，需要共同的基础设施（即大量的计算，微阵列和成像核心设施），并将受益于拟议中心将带来的智力协同作用和多学科合作。这一目标的一个重要方面是在出版时公开所有基本数据。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overarching goal of the proposed Center for Quantitative Biology is to instantiate at Princeton a research and teaching environment that fully meets the challenge and opportunity to practice a usefully quantitative biological science. The Center will increase the bandwidth of communication among researchers from different disciplines and departments (including Molecular Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Computer Science, Chemical Engineering and Physics), some of whom are already collaborating on quantitative projects and others who are planning to do so. For both undergraduate and graduate students, the Center will provide a focus for a new way of multidisciplinary teaching and learning, where the quantitative and biological are integrated from the beginning. The goal is to provide an education that prepares students with equal facility in biological and quantitative concepts. The specific aims are: (1) to develop realistic and quantitative models of biological processes; (2) to collect large-scale data sets comprehensively describing biological processes.; (3) to devise new and improved methods for computational analysis and display of complex models, structures and data; (4) to institute at Princeton new curricula and course of quantitative biology education for undergraduates, graduate students, and the larger scientific community; and (5) to reduce these ideas to practice in several collaborative and multi-disciplinary projects, each aimed at a specific biological question in the subject areas of (i) spatial patterning during development; (ii) intracellular signaling and transcriptional networks, and (iii) virus-host interactions. All these projects have common quantitative goals, require a common infrastructure (i.e. substantial computation, microarray and imaging core facilities) and will benefit from the intellectual synergy and multi-disciplinary cooperation that the proposed Center will bring. An important aspect of this aim is to make all underlying data publicly available upon publication.