2^nd Okinawa Conference on Mathematics and Biology at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

Multi-Scale Phenomena In Biology

November 4th to 6th, 2008
OIST Seaside House, Okinawa, Japan

Organized by Robert Sinclair and Klaus M. Stiefel

General Information

Important Information

Application -- Workshop Application Closed --

Workshop Schedule

Travel Rules (for Participents)

OIST Seaside House

Lectures

Confirmed Speakers:

Bjorn Engquist
Hans Othmer
Keiko Takahashi
Diego Rasskin-Gutman
Klaus M. Stiefel
Tony Bell
Robert Warner
Walter R. Tschinkel
Werner Callebaut
Maddalena Venturoli

Scope:

A multitude of biological phenomena are described at multiple levels. What are the commonalities and differences between neuroscience, evolutionary biology, molecular biology and ecology in this regard?

How can mathematics help in describing these phenomena? We invite applications for attendants. Travel scholarships available. We encourage the applications by graduate students and post-docs who's research interests touch these subjects.

Multi-Scale Phenomena in Biology

In neuroscience, phenomena relevant for brain function occur at the spatial scale of single proteins (nm), up to the scale of whole brains (cm). At each scale, different types of structures, from ion channels, to neurons, to small circuits to brain regions to whole nervous systems, come into play. Similarly, vastly different temporal scales are involved in brain function, from the ms necessary for ion channel opening to the years covered by long-term memory.

Equally, in ecology, spatial and temporal scales from the differences in water currents above and below a table-coral to the global dispersal patterns of fishes come into play.

Evolutionary biology possibly spans the widest range of scales; alterations of single bases in the DNA of an organism interact with macro-evolutionary trends encompassing the whole biosphere for 100s of million years.

In molecular biology, when aiming to describe a whole single-cell organism (like E.coli) multi-scale problems are encountered as well. The study of social insects is another inherently multi-scale problem – the behavior of each ant, bee or termite contributes to the highly complex activities displayed by the colony as a whole.

In all of these fields, different concepts are used in the descriptions of the structures and dynamics at the different scales involved. This introduces artificial boundaries, as, for instance, ion channels do not exist in isolation from brain regions, and vice versa. This problem is aggravated when constructing numerical models of these phenomena, as the dynamical equations used are confined to one or, at most, a few spatial and temporal scales. The smaller and faster scales typically enter the model as abstractions contained in the model's basic elements. The larger and slower scales enter as boundary conditions and motivations of the model. These scale cut-offs are arbitrary and we suspect that a satisfactory description of nature can only be achieved once they are overcome. A related question is how the interactions between different scales compare within and across fields. What are the commonalities and differences of the interactions between ion channels and neurons on one hand, and neurons and networks on the other hand? How do the interactions between two scales in neuroscience compare to the interactions between two scales in ecology?

Multi-scale systems provide modelers with a particularly serious challenge, since naive methods would force one to use units of the smallest scale even when one is mainly interested in features associated with the largest scale, and this would easily lead to algorithms which not even the largest and fastest supercomputers could handle. multi-scale mathematics aims to provide systematic approaches which are both accurate and also able to be efficiently implemented. The field involves continuum and discrete modeling, including network theory, making use of both analysis and statistics.

We invited leading scholars from a number of disciplines faced with multi-scale challenges and from mathematical disciplines potentially able to tackle these challenges. We hope that this conference stimulates interdisciplinary dialog and aids the development of mathematical techniques useful in describing biological multi-scale phenomena.

E-mail: multi@oist.jp
Tel. +81-98-921-4087 Fax. +81-98-921-4021
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
12-22, Suzaki, Uruma, Okinawa 904-2234
Japan