工学院专题学术讲座  | Xinying Ren 任心影: Multiscale Design Principles for Stable and Robust Multicellular Communities

时间：2023年9月19日（周二）10:00-11:30

Time: 10:00-11:30, Tuesday, October 19, 2023

地点: 西湖大学云谷校区E10-306

Venue: E10-306, Yungu Campus

主持人: 西湖大学工学院 李凌 教授

Host: Dr. Ling Li, Chair Professor, Westlake University

语言: 英文

Language: English

主讲嘉宾/Speaker：

Dr. Xinying Ren 任心影

California Institute of Technology

主讲人简介/Biography:

Xinying(Cindy) Ren received her B.E. degree in Automation at Tsinghua University in 2015. She received her Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech in 2021, working on control theory foundations for synthetic biocircuits and design principles for synthetic microbial communities, supervised by Prof. Richard Murray. From 2021, she works as a post-doctoral fellow in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, focusing on model validation and testing algorithms for multi-agent systems.

讲座摘要/Abstract:

Multicellular communities and microbiomes have been harnessed in biotechnology applications such as wastewater treatment and bioremediation for over a century. One major challenge is to engineer large-scale multicellular communities for stable and robust coexistence, as well as precise biosynthesis and controllable interactions with environments. Synthetic biology and genetic engineering tools provide a bottom-up approach to design and create multicellular communities with more quantitative and predictable dynamics. In this talk, I will formulate the design task of multicellular communities as a control problem of a multilayered system and propose multiscale design principles that regulate single-cell level dynamics to population level and population-environment level dynamics. The layered structure of cell-population-environment in multicellular communities suggests that stability and robustness of population level behaviors can emerge from instability and fragility of single cells. We show with specific designs of synthetic biocircuits and cell-cell communication systems that a stable and robust total biomass can be maintained in a heterogeneous population whereas each single cell presents an unstable and stochastically switching dynamics. Moreover, I will discuss stable coexistence criteria of multicellular communities derived from a new model framework that integrates population level gene expression, growth and inter-species interactions, compared to the widely used Lotka-Volterra equation in the past 100 years.

讲座联系人/Contact:

Huangdanping@westlake.edu.cn

Wangzihan@westlake.edu.cn