About the topic
Seven decades after Erwin Schrödinger asked, “What is life?” and postulated the principle of “order from disorder” in living matter, our mechanistic understanding of life is still limited. In my talk, I will present how interdisciplinary research using multiscale approaches from physics and molecular biology can facilitate our understanding of the general challenge of living systems – to balance energy homeostasis and robust information processing. Calcium as an important second messenger in eukaryotic cells plays a central role in this challenge as it translates extracellular signals into versatile intracellular responses. Despite long-lasting research activities, we have only recently deciphered the signaling mechanism by performing and interpreting biological experiments from a physical perspective and complementing this by mechanistic multiscale simulations. This integrative approach reveals mechanisms for robust information encoding and a downstream metabolic decoding relation of the noisy calcium dynamics. Based on these insights we are currently investigating how forced calcium signals can induce cell state transitions including those relevant in diseases such as cancer. About Alex
About the speaker
Alexander Skupin studied physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin and graduated in 2004 under supervision of Lutz Schimansky-Geier with work on noise-induced effects in neuronal networks. In 2008, he obtained his PhD in theoretical biophysics at the Humboldt University for his interdisciplinary work on calcium signaling with Martin Falcke. After his first postdoc focusing on metabolism with Oliver Ebenhöh at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, he spent 2 years at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle (USA) where he continued his interdisciplinary work with Aimee Dudley on Systems Genetics, with Sui Huang on cell fate dynamics and with David Galas on information flow in biological systems. In 2014, he started his interdisciplinary “Integrative Cell Signalling” research group at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) where his team combines microscopy and single cell analysis techniques with theoretical concepts from physics to investigate principles of living matter and their implications for health and disease.