Plenary Event 3: Multicellularity

8-9 January 2014
St Catherine’s College, Oxford

Understanding cooperative interactions in large ensembles of cells necessitates integration between different scales. Examples of such phenomena include the capacity of the same genotype to differentiate into many different phenotypes depending on environmental factors; quorum sensing where a colony of cells send chemical signals to each other that lead to modified patterns of gene expression in all of the them in a collective way, thereby preparing them for a new collective mode of action; and the “social” aspects of life in bacterial biofilms that allow them to make the colony more resilient, and for example more resistant to antibiotics. The extensive knowledge gained from studying the statistical physics of interacting systems that undergo phase transitions, albeit using simplified models, puts physicists in a unique position to help understand the collective properties of living cells.

Who should attend?

We invite particiption by academic staff from physical and life science departments in the UK who are interested in the central goal of the Network. We are particularly keen to encourage participation by clinicians and industrial scientists, to foster the development of relationships with end-users of the research.

Purpose

Our Focussed Workshops will provide a mechanism to nucleate new collaborative partnerships that wil lead to outstanding science and the award of grants by research councils. One of the central goals of the Plenary Events will be to prepare the ground for those Workshops and to help us build a programme for understanding the physics of life. Discussion sessions will be a very important element of the events, and it is hoped that all attendees will come ready to engage fully in that element of the programme.

Programme

Day 1

12:30	Lunch
1:30	Introduction
13:45	Herbert Levine (Rice): “Collective Cell Motion during Wound Healing”
14:25	Jacques Prost (ESPCI): “Reflections about Active Systems”
15:05	Discussion
15:30	Coffee
15:50	Breakout 1
16:50	Report back
17:10	Ottoline Leyser (Cambridge): “How Useful are Numbers?”
18:30	Dinner
20:00	Bela Novak (Oxford): “Cycling Down the Road to Multicellularity”

Day 2

09:00	Joe Howard (MPI-CBG): “Microtubules and Morphology”
09:40	Wilson Poon (Edinburgh): “Bacterial Colonies as Active Soft Matter”
10:20	Discussion
10:45	Coffee
11:00	Breakout 2
12:00	Report back
12:15	Dennis Bray (Cambridge): “Limits of Computational Biology: From Bacteria to Brains”
13:00	Lunch and Close

Registration

The registration fee includes lunch on both days and dinner, bed and breakfast for the night of January 8. Register on line.

Directions

The meeting will take place at St. Catherine’s College, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UJ. Maps and directions are available on the College’s web site (https://www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/contact/map-and-directions).