The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the Simons Foundation, has launched four new centers to bring mathematical perspectives to the biological search for the Rules of Life.
The NSF-Simons Research Centers for Mathematics of Complex Biological Systems will explore how information encoded in DNA results in complex organisms with diverse forms, functions and behaviors when it is manipulated by changing environments across multiple time scales.
Such knowledge may lead to a predictive framework for understanding the pathways that lead from the DNA within a cell to the myriad expressions of an organism in its environment, with applications to agriculture and health.
"Many people think of math as proofs or calculations, but it's so much more," said Juan Meza, director of NSF's Division of Mathematical Sciences. "It's really a powerful tool that helps us study nature. By applying mathematics to the complex processes that underlie biology, we may finally be able to understand exactly how something as seemingly simple as a sequence of genes led to the broad diversity of organisms we see today."
Contingent on the availability of funds, each of the four centers will receive a total of $10 million to support a five-year project. NSF will distribute $20 million in federal funds that will be matched by $20 million provided independently by the Simons Foundation.
"We very much look forward to collaborating with NSF on this major public-private initiative to develop novel mathematical approaches to problems in biology," said Yuri Tschinkel, director for Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the Simons Foundation.
The four centers, selected through NSF's merit review process and an additional review by the Simons Foundation, are headquartered at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Northwestern University and the University of California, Irvine. Researchers will come together annually to share progress in meetings held at the Simons Foundation in New York City.
The centers will build research capacity at the interface between mathematics and biology through cross-disciplinary training of students and postdoctoral associates, outreach activities, and programs of nationwide scope for visiting researchers. Collectively, the centers will produce a new generation of scientists equipped to tackle questions that cannot be answered today.
"The NSF-Simons Centers will enable scientists to understand, in unprecedented clarity, how genes translate into so many diverse phenotypes," said Theresa Good, acting director of NSF's Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences. "This effort will help NSF address one of its 10 Big Ideas , Understanding the Rules of Life: Predicting Phenotype , explaining how the Rules of Life are expressed across many scales of structure and time."
The four centers are:
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