Bioinformatics Institute (Singapore)

Transcription

[Music playing] The Mechanobiology Institute is a unique place it was founded about five years ago with the vision of bringing together this merger between physics, engineering, biology, and chemistry. Mechanobiology is a new term for the physics of cellular interactions and is another form of quote-unquote physiology. What we're really trying to understand is that at a molecular level how does a cell know where it is in a tissue and how does it know how to behave properly in terms of the mechanical environment of that tissue Singapore is one of the few places in the world that's willing to take that risk to take an area that's not yet mainstream in biology or in physics but believe in the people that are setting up the institute and believe in the quality the science that will be produced and then later in the outcome and the technologies the vision for the Institute was that he would be in an environment where groups of engineers biologists physicists and chemists could interact in interdisciplinary fashion to approach the problems of how do cells mechanically interact with their environment this is relevant to a number disease states such as cancer cardiovascular disease and the issues with aging I think one of the unique features or the strengths of MBI is of course the people. We've been lucky and able to recruit a really highly motivated group of people and then it's not just that they're each motivated for their own projects but there's real team spirit here and they feel as part of one institute that's working for a common goal and so in some sense like although there are many different groups we're all one big team here we have a multiple labs who all work together and we all have different specialties. We bring all techniques together. Even in the individual labs like in Mikes group we have a Drosophila biologist and we have a chemist like me, and we have a material scientist we all put things together and thats what makes the MBI very unique and you can push yourself out of your comfort zone to learn a few things from different people in different fields and that's what makes you grow. I think that MBI is the best platform for doing interdisciplinary sciences in my whole life I have never seen such an institute which has people from all different disciplines of maths, physics, chemistry computing, mechanical engineering and everything. So physicists do not need to be afraid of biology anymore and biologists do not need to be afraid of physics anymore we can teach each other things just like friends what we were trying to do was provide this open lab environment where the interdisciplinary interactions could occur labs were not in silos, an engineer could talk to a biologist and that's really where a lot of innovation can occur my own lab has been looking at the stretching of substrates and the effects of even a one percent stretch, which you and I do as we walk on the growth and the behaviour of systems. One big part of my area of research actually involves developing microfluidic by devices using cell mechanics principals to detect and diagnose diseases such as malaria and cancer. This microfluidic device is able to enabled the blood as it routes through the specially designed channels two separate the larger and stiffer cancer cells from the smaller and more deformable blood cells. So once this cancer cells are collected, the clinicians can actually conduct more detail genetic analysis of such cancer cells and thereafter determine any specific mutation that the person may be suffering from If this mutations are drug-able clinicians can then administer the right drug to the patient at the right time My lab works on how cell mechanical constraints alter nuclear architecture and thereby impinging on genome regulatory programs so are lab has taken an interdisciplinary approach in thinking about how cells in the local microenvironment perceive mechanical signals, transduce the signals to the nucleus and how within the nucleus many modular designs and genetic regulatory programs are set up. Our lab at the MBI are interested in the interface between cell biology and mechanobiology. In particular we are very interested in the role of membrane dynamics So as you probably know the membrane is extremely plastic, so that makes it a very challenging problem to study but at the same time is very important because all the biochemical reactions we know either happens on the membrane or happens in a compartment that's created by a lipid bilayer. So understanding how membranes are organized is essential for us to understand how a cell works My main research area is actually to try to understand and visualize how the microenvironment surrounding cells effects the way that cell-cell interacts with each other. We test new ways of controlling the micro-environment around cells in 3d and controlling as much as possible the different parameters of this microenvironment that the cells feel around them It involves also optics because once you control the microenvironment you also want to be able to visualize how cell-cell interactions or changed. We managed to do super-resolution imaging. It delves down to tens of nanometers in resolution but we managed to do that in 3d over the whole cell body MBI is an excellent platform for us to interact with various scientists. There are many visiting scientists that visit our Institute and we have the opportunity to speak to them directly and share our ideas and also networking with them. For myself as a visiting professor at MBI the ability to interface again with this multi-disciplinary institute that we have has enhanced my research in absolutely every aspect and two perform experiments and move in ways that we never could have individually. Here in MBI we really are doing new exciting research. We're discovering new areas new answers to old problems it's not 'me too' kind of research, we are really having a lot of fun being very innovative. We have an initiative in the area skin we have initiatives in cancer and in regener ation stem cells we see ourselves playing a major role in trying to take the understanding of the mechanics and now applying it to a number of different disease situations for the future