Join the
Tsingos group to model how subcellular protein interactions regulate organ-scale morphology in animal development.
Your jobHow do cells shape tissues? How are cells themselves shaped by the proteins within them? How do all these different levels of regulation interact to create functional organs? These questions are fundamental in developmental biology and also have applications in regenerative biomedicine. Understanding the multiscale regulatory feedbacks between genes, proteins, cell behaviours, and tissue-scale mechanics is a major challenge.
You will tackle this challenge by developing mechanistic computational models. You will apply these models to recapitulate key aspects of intestinal development in the nematode
Caenorhabditis elegans, which is an excellent model system to study multiscale regulation, as mutations in proteins involved in cell shaping lead to cascading impacts on organ-level morphogenesis and lumen formation.
The project will consist of creating models at various levels (subcellular, cell-level, organ-level). At the subcellular level, you will develop models of protein interactions using ordinary differential equations. In a second step, these can be integrated with cell based models to investigate feedbacks between subcellular networks and cell shape regulation. One potential direction of the project is to then investigate how the virtual cells interact to shape an entire simulated organ.
To calibrate and parametrize the models, you will have access to data from experimental collaborators (Boxem Lab). In turn, your models will help our experimental collaborators design targeted experiments to test model predictions.
Come be part of the vibrant Computational Biology community at Utrecht University!