Scientific report: Training workshop interdisciplinary life sciences

Abstract

This preprint is the outcome of the “Training Workshop Interdisciplinary Life Sciences”, held in October 2013 in the Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands. The motivation to organize this event stems from the following considerations: The enormous progress in laboratory techniques and facilities leads to the availability of huge amounts of data at all levels of complexity (molecules, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, populations, ecosystems). Especially data at the cellular level reveal details of life processes we were unconscious of until recently. However, it becomes clear that huge amounts of data alone do not automatically lead to understanding. The data explosion in Life Sciences teaches one lesson: life processes are of a highly intricate and integrative nature. To really understand the dynamic processes in living organisms one must integrate experimental data sets in quantitative and predictive models. Only then one may hope to grasp the functioning of these complex systems and be able to convert information in understanding. In the field of physics, for instance, this strong interaction between experiment and theory is already common practice since centuries, culminating in the 20th century being called the ’Century of Physics’. In contrast to physics, the complex nature of the Life Sciences forces us to work in an interdisciplinary fashion. The necessary expertise is available, but scattered over many scientific disciplines. Only the combined efforts of biologists, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and informaticians will lead to progress in tackling the huge challenge of understanding the complexity of life. Researchers in the Life Sciences often focus their research on a rather narrow research field. However, the majority of the upcoming generation of researchers in the Life Sciences should be trained to expand their skills, becoming able to tackle complex, multi-dimensional systems. The knowledge they have to incorporate in their research will stem from a diverse range of disciplines, So, they should be trained to integrate a broad range of modelling approaches in order to deduce quantitative, predictive and often multi-scale models from highly diverse data sets. Present curricula in the Life Sciences hardly offer this kind of training yet. This workshop intends to start filling this gap.

Three teams worked on the following open problems: 1) Modeling the influence of temperature on the Regulation of flowering time in Arabidopsis thaliana; 2) Validation of computational models of angiogenesis to experimental data; 3) Reconstructing the gene network that regulates branching in Tomato. This preprint bundles the reports of the three teams.