Collaborative Research: Search, Signals and Information Exchange in Distributed Biological Systems

生物体、社会和计算机都是复杂的系统，其行为产生于各组成部分的相互作用。例如，有效的免疫反应需要数十亿个免疫细胞之间的协调相互作用，而没有中心控制点，蚁群的行为来自数百万只蚂蚁之间的分布式交流。这项研究将研究蚁群和免疫系统如何形成分布式信息交换网络。通过详细研究分布式交互网络如何在两个不同的系统中指导搜索策略，本项目将形成一个一般理论，描述分散的生物网络如何组织起来搜索、响应和适应不同的环境，以及它们如何有效地扩展到大规模。广泛的理论目标是了解网络的大小、结构和动态如何影响生物功能。该项目将为一个跨学科的教育项目做出贡献，该项目将现场实验与计算建模相结合，为大学预科、本科生和研究生提供服务。提出了招募和培训代表性不足群体成员的计划。研究人员很好地实现了这一目标，因为新墨西哥大学是全国仅有的两所大学之一，既是少数民族服务机构，也是卡内基非常高研究活动大学。与大学预科教育项目的互动将使当地学生以一种引人入胜和易于理解的方式接触跨学科科学。

Organisms, societies and computers are all complex systems whose behavior emerges from the interactions of components. For example, effective immune response requires coordinated interactions between billions of immune cells with no central point of control, and the behavior of ant colonies emerges from distributed communication between millions of ants. This research will examine how ant colonies and immune systems form distributed information exchange networks. By studying in detail how distributed interaction networks guide searching strategies in two distinct systems, this project will formulate a general theory describing how decentralized biological networks are organized to search, respond and adapt to different environments, and how they effectively scale up to large sizes. The broad theoretical goal is to understand how network size, structure and dynamics affect biological function.The project will contribute to an interdisciplinary education program that integrates field experiments with computational modeling and serves pre-college, undergraduate and graduate students. Plans are presented to recruit and train members of underrepresented groups. The investigators are well situated to achieve this, as the University of New Mexico is one of only two universities in the nation that are both a Minority Serving Institution and a Carnegie Very High Research Activity University. Interactions with pre-college education projects will expose local students to interdisciplinary science in a way that is engaging and accessible.