MATHEMATICS OF SELF-ORGANISATION IN CELL SYSTEMS
 
 
 
by Steffen Härting
by Moritz Mercker
by Moritz Mercker
by Steffen Härting
Seminar

Computational analysis and mathematical modelling of heterogeneous cell populations

Supervisors
Dr. Simon Anders (s.anders@zmbh.uni-heidelberg.de)
Prof. Dr. Anna Marciniak-Czochra (anna.marciniak@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de)
Time: Tuesdays, 14:00h (sharp)
Participants:
Master's students Mathematics, Ph.D students are also encouraged to join.
Abstract:
Studying biological processes on the level of single cells is an important point of view in molecular biology research. Various techniques allow us to measure for a large number of cells the abundance of specific RNA ("single-cell RNA sequencing") or protein molecules ("flow cytometry") to characterize the type and state of the cell, and to understand the dynamic processes governing state changes of the cells. This seminar will explore two mathematical methods behind two aspects of this area of computational biology: First, we will learn how methods from multi-dimensional statistics and statistical learning can be used to characterize cells by treating them as vectors in "feature space", the space spanned by the various measurements taken on the cell, and attempting to understand the manifold described by the cells by means of dimension-reduction and other methods. Second, we will discuss deterministic and stochastic approaches to mathematical modelling and analysis of cell population dynamics, including differential equations and Markov models. In particular, we will discuss multi-compartmental ordinary differential equations models describing transitions between different differentiation stages and first order transport equations (structured population models) accounting for continuous transitions. The differential equations approach to modelling of the continuum of heterogeneous cells will be compared to stochastic approaches allowing tracing single cell behaviour.
Organisation:
If you are interested in the seminar, please register on Müsli, so that we can communicate with you.

On Tuesday, 21.4.2020 14.00 o'clock there will be an online introduction to the seminar. Further information on the technicalities will via Müsli. In this first online meeting, we will also distribute the seminar topics.

The seminar talks will be scheduled to the end of the semester. Hopefully, then we can meet in person in a seminar room.

Materials:
A list of topics with literature references will be uploaded later .