Prof. Dr. Wolfram Pönisch, Computational Biology Research Centre – Biophysical Modelling, HUMAN TECHNOPOLE, Milano, Italy

Seminar Room 0.125, MPZPM, Kussmaulallee 2, 91054 Erlangen
Location Details

Abstract
Most biological processes are intrinsically noisy. Yet, noise is often regarded as a hindrance to biological function, and its functional role is commonly ignored. This is especially evident in fluctuations biological shape across scales, particularly of cells and tissues, where noise is often mistaken for non-functional biological variability.
In my talk, I will first show how morphometric analysis of microscopy data of cells undergoing epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition can be used to interrogate the morphodynamics of cells during state transitions. I will show that complex cellular morphodynamics can be embedded in a low-dimensional morphospace, where cell shape changes are represented as trajectories. By combining stochastic inference approaches and mathematical modelling, we find that the shape dynamics accompanying the state transitions is characterised by a transient noise peak and show that the noise controls the rate of transitions between the shape attractors associated with epithelial and mesenchymal states.
I will then extend the morphometric framework to study the morphodynamics of developing zebrafish optic cups, illustrating how similar approaches can be used to investigate tissue-scale morphodynamics and the control of left-right symmetry in organ development.
Together, these examples illustrate how the quantitative data analysis and modelling of morphodynamics of living matter, in close collaboration with experimentalists, provides novel insights into biological function during development and disease. The combination of these approaches identifies stochasticity as a key regulator of cell and tissue dynamics.