How do small molecular and physical changes determine the way cells and complex organisms evolve and adapt to their changing environment?
Can we understand and quantify these processes?
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How do molecules in cells determine changes in organisms, and how do these processes respond to environmental stimuli? Answers to these questions will reveal the adaptive behaviour of life and how it can remain robust, yet adapt in the face of changing environments. This "adaptive" robustness is countered by sensitivity: even a small change in a single molecule can affect an entire organism.
How can we understand the flow of information from the genome to the environment and back? Clearly, we are looking at processes that propagate through all organizational levels of life and well beyond, to where the interactions of organisms with the environment shape evolution. From a simple base pair change in a molecule called DNA to the adaptive behavior of life on this planet.
Our ability to answer these questions strictly depends on our ability to integrate the findings from very different scales of life - from microscopic to macroscopic - and from different disciplines - from molecular biology to physics and computer science.
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The necessity to transgress all levels of life is reflected in the unique composition of IQBI equipment: from Single Molecule Real Time Sequencer (SMRT) to super-resolution (STED), TIRF and light sheet microscopy, to nanoCT to micro-manufacturing tools, to entire controlled environments for living organisms such as plants and insects.
The Integrated Quantitative Bioscience Initiative (IQBI) unites a unique team with expertise in a broad range of fields, and covering a large range of scales. Yet our biologists, chemists, engineers and biophysicists share the understanding of biological processes as connected systems. Together, they aim to quantitatively characterize the information that flows back and forth between molecules, cells, tissues, organisms and the environment.
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