Human cells, like the people they create, are dynamic and complex. And while researchers can create images and videos of how they move, organize and change their properties, it’s hard to efficiently and accurately describe all that’s happening.
So a 75-person team at Seattle nonprofit Allen Institute is embarking on a 10-year project called CellScapes to devise a new language using mathematics to capture these essential processes.
“This is a new way of approaching very fundamental cell biology,” Ru Gunawardane, executive director and vice president of the Allen Institute for Cell Science, told GeekWire. “We want to combine math and biophysical modeling, which are things that people are doing right now, but in a siloed way in very different systems.”
