Active Processes in Biology: Observing, Describing, Perturbing, and Controlling

Date

Nov 14, 2022

Time

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Speaker

Florian Berger

Affiliation

Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Biophysics, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Host

Carl Modes

Description

The physical understanding of a system is based on four steps: observing, describing, perturbing, and controlling. While this strategy was very successful in Physics to study inanimate matter, it poses new challenges when applied to active biological systems. In this presentation, I will explain our latest attempts to overcome some of these challenges and discuss what we can learn from them. For a quantitative and reliable observation of moving cells, we use deep-learning models to perform image-to-image translation tasks. To connect molecular mechanisms of the force production of molecular motors to cellular behavior, we use physical descriptions that we implement in large-scale simulations. In particular, we show that tight regulation of the microtubule cytoskeleton by molecular motors in T cells is necessary for these cells to be activated when encountering pathogen cells. From the perturbation of active oscillation of hair cells in the inner ear, we can infer the energy that they dissipate. Very recently we built a closed-loop feedback microscope to control cellular and intracellular activity. We believe that the spatio-temporal control of active biological systems provides a novel way to study and understand their underlying functional principles. Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86493881547?pwd=VW9pcjVOTmlSL0NIWGJnWGVMczg1dz09 Meeting ID: 864 9388 1547 Passcode: 327800

Last modified: Nov 15, 2022, 7:40:03 AM