Large-scale biological phenomena arising from small-scale biophysical processes.

Organizers: Jeanette Wheeler, Karen Chan

 

**Registration support is available to early career or underrepresented scientists presenting at the complimentary contributed session, please reach out to the organizers for details **

At scales far below what the human eye can see, individual cells organize and behave in ways that can have unexpected and wide-reaching consequences, cascading upward to spatial and temporal scales far beyond the reach of individual cells. The emergence of large-scale patterns from small-scale behavior and physiology is a broad theme of research interest across multiple biological fields: in cell biology, we see it in the organization of tissues and in multicellularity; in aquatic ecology, we see it in the survival of planktonic populations in patchy and resource-scarce environments; in terrestrial microbiology, we see it in the diversity and success of bacterial populations and biofilms in soil systems and other porous media.  Cross-disciplinary research on problems like this helps us better understand both the natural world and the evolutionary principles that shape it, but often, practitioners work along the fringes of traditional subject silos.  This symposium provides a venue for biologists and biophysicists from many research fields to come together to pool expertise, research methods, and new ideas centered around the functional consequences of these small-scale biological processes.

Recent technological advances have made previously inaccessible small-scale processes more transparent than ever. The work by the proposed speakers in this symposium marries state-of-the-
artmicroscopy, microfluidics, and microscale field sampling techniques with mathematical modeling and theory to elucidate the large-scale effects of individual-cell, small-scale processes. There are three thematic sections to the symposium. The first section (speakers: Prakash, Wang, Nerurkar, Miller) discusses how small-scale biomechanics shape tissue formation. The second section (speakers: Kanso, Bondoc-Naumovitz, Pepper, Guasto, Gralka) discusses how small-scale biophysics shape ecological interactions. Finally, the third section (speakers: Marquez-Zacarias and Larson) discusses how physical forces shape the evolution of early life. We will conclude the symposium with a round table discussion to explore ways to promote cross-disciplinary study and systematic investigations that span multiple levels of biological organization. 

TIME	SPEAKER	INSTITUTION	CAREER STAGE	TALK TITLE
8:15	Jeanette Wheeler; Karen Chan	Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador; Swarthmore College	Assistant Professors	Symposium introduction: Functional consequences of microscale biophysical processes
8:30	Vivek Prakash	University of Miami	Assistant Professor	Tissue mechanics govern plastic shape changes and asexual reproduction in a simple animal
9:00	Rui Wang	Swarthmore College	Postdoc	Body axis inheritance via Wnt gradients in regenerating Hydra tissue fragments
9:30	Nandan Nerurkar	Columbia University	Assistant Professor	Multi-scale mechanobiology in buckling morphogenesis of the small intestine
10:00	Callie Miller	James Madison University	Assistant Professor	Developing modeling and image analysis tools to investigate mechanosensing proteins
10:30	Break
11:00	Eva Kanso	University of Southern California	Professor	Cilia powered flows
11:30	Karen Grace Bondoc-Naumovitz	University of Exeter	Postdoc	Microscale interactions of glasses and chalks
12:00	Deepak Krishnamurthy	University of California Berkeley	Postdoc	Active sinking particles: Sessile suspension feeders significantly alter the flow and transport to sinking aggregates
12:30	Lunch
14:00	Jeff Guasto	Tufts University	Professor	Physical mechanisms regulating bacterial transport in porous media
14:30	Matti Gralka	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Postdoc	Metabolic niche partition in marine particle-degrading bacteria
15:00	Pedro Márquez-Zacarías	Georgia Institute of Technology (will start at Santa Fe- Institute in Sept 2022)	Grad student	Emergence of multicellular morphology from single-cell symmetry properties
15:30	Ben Larson	University of California at San Francisco	Postdoc	Regulation of form in multicellular choanoflagellates and the evolutionary cell biology of morphogenesis
16:00	Panel Discussion + Additional question time for all speakers

 

Image Credit: Glynn Gorick and William M. Durham (Durham et al., Physics of Fluids 2012)