APS March Meeting 2010 Focus Session on Physics of Behavior -- From Molecules to Organisms

From Ilya Nemenman

Where

Portland, OR, APS March Meeting 2010

When

Session P10, Wed, Mar 17, 8-11am.

Mission Statement

Traditionally the interface between physics and biology has been defined by a simple fact that complex molecules underlie biological phenomena, and such molecules are a natural subject for physical studies. Now, maybe not surprisingly, we understand that the role of physics in biology is much broader, as physical constraints define the strategies and the biological machinery that living systems use to shape their behavior in the dynamic, noisy, and resource-limited physical world. Since neither the physical constraints imposed by the world, nor the tasks that biological systems trying to survive in it perform depend strongly on the structure of the said systems, studying behavior of living systems has a potential for a unified understanding, which would bring together various subfields of biological physics, from single molecules, to neural computation.

One classic example of such a system is bacterial chemotaxis---many bacteria will direct its movements towards certain chemicals. The behavioral strategy performed by the bacterium E. coli approaches an optimal solution in light of well-defined physical constraints due to diffusion. This broad view of chemotactic behavior in E. coli has revealed a deeper understanding of some general design principles of biochemical signaling networks, including how they can produce large output gain over a wide dynamic range, while remaining robust to fluctuation in protein levels and microscopic rates. The study of chemotaxis has clearly demonstrated that the search for physical principles at the systems-level complement reductionist studies at the molecular level, but that some principles emerge only when studying behavior of the network holistically.

Can similar understanding emerge for other, more complex living systems? With this Focus Session we hope to start a regular, yearly series of events at APS meetings that will attempt to answer this question and will explore new developments in the field broadly characterized as Behavioral Biophysics. We hope to attract an audience studying a variety of subjects, from single and multi-cellular information processing, dynamics of complex networks, through systems biology and neurally controlled motor behavior, and to psychophysics. We believe that this focus session will bring back some of the people who have been trained as physicists, but have migrated to other fields of science, such as computational neuroscience, systems and quantitative biology, and who typically no longer attend APS meetings.

Organizers

William Ryu, University of Toronto

Ilya Nemenman, Emory University

Speakers

1. Gordon Berman, Princeton University, Reconstructing the behavior of walking fruit flies
2. Michael Famulare, University of Washington, Mechanisms of adaptation to stimulus statistics in neuronal systems
3. Richard In-ho John, Georgia Tech, Collective decisions among bacterial viruses
4. Anna Kuchina, UT Southwestern, Cell fate determination dynamics in bacteria
5. Andrew Leifer, Harvard University, A remote control for the C. elegans nervous system
6. Patrick Mears, UIUC, High-resolution, long-term characterization of bacterial motility using optical tweezers
7. Ilya Nemenman, Emory University, Exploring neural code in natural environments
8. William Ryu, University of Toronto, Thermal impulse response and the temperature preference of Escherichia coli
9. Michael Samoilov, QB3: California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, UC Berkeley, Temperature control of molecular circuit switch responsible for virulent phenotype expression in uropathogenic Escherichia coli
10. Greg Stephens, Princeton University, The emergence of stereotyped behaviors in C. elegans
11. Susanne Still, University of Hawaii, Manoa, Interactive Learning
12. Nikita Vladimirov, Heidelberg University, Optimality in Bacterial Chemotaxis
13. John Wikswo, Vanderbilt University, Automated Probing and Inference of Analytical Models for Metabolic Network Dynamics
14. Yilin Wu, Harvard University, Cell order in bacterial swarms arises from reversals of moving direction