image: Using highly focused laser beams, the team can use light to grab and move particles inside the cells. This enables us to determine and modify the physical properties inside cells which will be compared to possible changes of chemical reaction rates in response to active mechanical fluctuations and changes in molecular crowding.
Credit: Till Münker
An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Göttingen University has been awarded a Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) research grant for the project “Noise or signal? Information fidelity at the edge of jamming”. The award is worth 1.2 million dollars for 3 years. Together with academics from New York University and Hokkaido University in the US and Japan, the funding will enable the development of innovative and international training and exchange of expertise, methods and new materials. This will support an interdisciplinary team of researchers to investigate the biophysical properties of biological and synthetic materials and develop ways to measure and understand signalling within cell materials.
Cells are densely packed with large molecules near a critical “jamming threshold”, meaning fluctuations in crowding squash the molecules together. While all of these collisions are well described, it is unclear to what extent this molecular crowding influences the working efficiencies of enzymes, for example, by restricting diffusion or by driving active forces that interact with enzymes inside the cell. The researchers want to better understand how changes in the physical properties of the cytoplasm – the material that most of the cell is made from – affect signalling pathways within living cells. This has important consequences for information processing: it would open up a new dimension in understanding how living systems change or modify their intracellular chemical reaction networks.
Principal investigator Professor Timo Betz at Göttingen University’s Faculty of Physics explains: “This funding will enable us to explore a completely original idea: that active forces and fluctuations in intracellular crowding are used by living systems to control key chemical reaction rates. This perspective opens up an entirely new way of understanding how cells integrate physical properties into their chemical functions. The HSFP funding is unique in supporting such high-risk, unconventional approaches that are often beyond the scope of traditional schemes, meaning researchers can pursue truly transformative research.”
HFSP Research Grants support innovative basic research into fundamental biological problems with emphasis placed on novel and interdisciplinary approaches that involve scientific exchanges across national and disciplinary boundaries. A hallmark is that teams must be based in different countries and wish to combine their expertise in innovative approaches to questions that could not be answered by individual laboratories.
Contact:
Professor Timo Betz
University of Göttingen
Faculty of Physics – Biophysics Institute
Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
Tel: +49 (0) 551 39 26921
Email: timo.betz@phys.uni-goettingen.de
www.betzlab.uni-goettingen.de/