Evolution of Reliable and Robust Regulatory Control

生物体被设计成可靠的，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。 在工程术语中，持续时间很长并处理各种意外情况的机器非常昂贵，并且通常不适合其任务-因此，工程师在设计时要考虑成本和效益。 这个项目从生物学的角度研究了同样类型的设计权衡。 例如，生物体是如何被设计成具有可靠性和坚固性的？ 在生物设计中如何解决成本和收益之间的权衡？ 这项工作将从这些设计的角度来研究生物学上的故障和修复的例子。 这些方法包括数学和计算机模型，以研究生物设计的问题，再加上现实生活中的崩溃例子的合成，如癌症，衰老，以及分子，使生物体工作的小规模组件。 这些研究将提高对生物学可靠性和稳健性的理解。 这种理解将通过提供对何时以及为什么发生崩溃的洞察力产生更广泛的影响-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.