Multiscale Mechanics

One of the most important scientific challenges of the 21st Century is to develop a comprehensive quantitative understanding of how cells function at the molecular level and how molecular actions determine cell and tissue behavior. Beyond the elementary importance of this question to fundamental biology, such knowledge is essential for a rational treatment of most diseases including, for example, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, viral infections, and metabolic diseases. During the last five decades, the isolation, biochemical and structural characterization of many of the molecules of cells as well as the sequencing of the human genome has provided first insights and fundamental concepts on how cells function. However, we are still at the beginning of a quantitative understanding of how the molecules in living cells interact to generate the complex patterns, responses, and signaling pathways that characterize living cells, and therefore tissues. One difficulty in achieving such understanding is that the interaction of many molecules through cells and tissues results in a multiscale problem, making the effect of any one particular intervention difficult to decipher.

To decipher and ultimately comprehend cellular systems of such complexity, it is widely expected that ground-breaking advances will require application of the methods of the quantitative sciences. These quantitative methods – experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches that have been developed on a range of problems in the physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics – could now, with further development, play key roles in defining modern . Moreover, it is impossible for individual laboratories and faculty members, each with expertise in a single discipline, to integrate these approaches, to successfully train students and young scientists, and to develop large center-based research activities around emerging themes in cellular systems. The challenge is interdisciplinary in nature and the scientific response must be interdisciplinary as well. One of the most important emerging themes is cell mechanics. By this term we encompass molecular interactions, both chemical and mechanical, that influence cell signaling, adhesion, migration, metabolism, the , gene expression, protein transcription, and mass transport within and across cells.

Five University of Michigan departments will participate in a cluster of junior faculty hires in multiscale cell mechanics as defined above. The proposed positions are in: in vivo imaging of cellular and mechanotransduction (Department of Biomedical Engineering), quantitative cell biology (Department of Cell and Developmental Biology), engineering of tissues consisting of multiple interacting cell types (Department of Chemical Engineering), studies of mechanics of the cell (Department of Mechanical Engineering), and in vivo imaging of host-microbe interactions (Department of Microbiology and Immunology).