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James Glazier

2012-05-28
11:00:00 - 12:00:00

103 , Mathematics Research Center Building (ori. New Math. Bldg.)

Embryonic development, adult homeostasis, wound healing, regeneration, and diseases like cancer, all result from a basic repertory of cell behaviors. While we know a good deal about the molecular state inside individual cells, we know much less about how cells interact with each other and the environment which they, themselves build, to create emergent functional tissues. Synthetic Biology and Tissue Engineering employ the same behaviors to build or induce biological structures. Biochemical signaling, regulatory and metabolic networks interact with the motility, force generation and shape changes of cells, extracellular signals and extracellular matrix creating additional complexity. Because of the difficulty of experiments, simulations play a crucial role in disentangling the multiple behaviors which interact in any organism or experiment. I will outline the issues we face in building such simulations, introduce the GGH approach and discuss applications including the formation of the early body plan, focusing on gastrulation and segmentation, to illustrate some of the biomedical questions this type of simulation can address.