New institute will explore complex biological interactions

Abraham M. Lenhoff

9 a.m., Jan. 17, 2005--The University of Delaware and Los Alamos National Laboratory are partners with Johns Hopkins University in the establishment of a new advanced institute dedicated to computational biology research and education.

The Institute for Multi-Scale Modeling of Biological Interactions is supported by a three-year, $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and is directed by Michael Paulaitis, a Johns Hopkins professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering who formerly was a member of the faculty at UD.

Institute co-directors are Abraham M. Lenhoff, Gore Professor of Chemical Engineering at UD, and Bertrand Garcia-Moreno, professor of biophysics, and Pablo Iglesias, professor of electrical and computer engineering, both from Johns Hopkins.

The institute will draw on a variety of scientific disciplines to study biological systems across multiple scales of time and length, ranging from protein interactions at the molecular level to the behavior of complex biochemical networks in entire organisms.

"Applications of mathematical modeling and simulations to describe biological interactions have become increasingly important in recent years as a complement to traditional laboratory research," Paulaitis said. "However, in recognizing the growing acceptance of the computational methods themselves, this new institute will focus on applying combinations of computational methods as a general and clearly powerful approach to unraveling the hierarchical nature of complex biological interactions."

Participants will be drawn from such diverse disciplines as biophysics, chemistry, physiology, chemical and biomolecular engineering, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical and computer engineering.

The federal grant will allow the new institute to support doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. About 10 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are expected to participate in the institute's training program at any one time. Lenhoff said UD hopes to add two graduate students and one postdoctoral fellow to the program each of the first two years.

Lenhoff said the institute is primarily a training program for the students and also will serve as a means to foster collaborations, both internally and with the researchers at Johns Hopkins and Los Alamos.

UD was selected as a partner in the project because it has strengths in the emerging field of systems biology that complement strengths at Johns Hopkins in biophysics and bioengineering, Lenhoff said, adding, “Between us, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Systems biology is a “very important emerging research area,” Lenhoff said, and one that is designed to “provide insight on how very complex biological systems work.”

For the last 50 years, Lenhoff said, biologists have been trying to reduce biology to its individual pieces in order to understand what each individual molecule does. However, all of the individual pieces must work together to create a living creature and “understanding how that works is well suited to the tools of systems engineering,” he said.

Article by Neil Thomas
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

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