Schedule   Participants   1998-1999 Mathematics in Biology 

Cell adhesion and motility are vital to many physiological processes, such as inflammation, wound healing and metastasis, as well as biotechnology applications (e.g. cell-adhesion-based separation and purification) and the nascent field of tissue engineering, where achieving and controlling the cellularity of bioartificial tissues is critical.

The advent of cell and molecular biology has enabled the development of mechanistic models relating molecular properties such as integrin-mediated adhesion and F-actin regulated motility to these cell functions. However, much remains to be accomplished, especially in developing models that make explicit account for the role of adhesion in cell migration, in external fields (e.g. gradients of adhesion or chemotactic factor molecules, or aligned extracellular matrix fibers). Exploiting the ability to now manipulate molecular properties of the cell and create such fields affords profound opportunities for model validation and development. In addition to assembling a group of investigators who can pioneer such models and their testing, another focus will be on examining the origin and role of stochasticity that is manifest in cell adhesion and motility and to discuss diffusion approximation methods that can be applied to stochastic mechanistic models in order to obtain more tractable PDE formulations.