Slightly more than a month after officially opening, faculty members at the Center for Systems Biology are working to bridge the gap between biology and analytical sciences.
The center, one of seven in the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, will fund projects that research biological dynamics within the cell using both experimental biology and computational mathematics, said Philip Benfey, director of CSB and a professor of biology.
"Historically, there have been serious communication issues between scientists and mathematicians," he said. "In systems biology, we are working hard to fix those."
The center has only been in operation since the beginning of the fall semester, but this field of biology has been in the works at Duke for several years, said Joshua Socolar, an associate professor of physics and a faculty member at the facility.
Funding for the center comes from a $14.5-million grant from the National Institute for General Medical Sciences announced in July.
The faculty involved in the group-half of whom are biologists and half of whom study computational analysis-said they developed their idea for CSB out of a series of informal seminars held at the University several years ago meant to educate scientists in different disciplines about their work.
"When biologists presented their work in these seminars, they had to accept very naive questions from analysts like myself," Socolar said. "Likewise, I had to be willing to explain the most basic [analytical] details to biologists in the audience."
Though the center mainly works with graduate students and researchers, faculty are working toward developing some undergraduate classes as well, Benfey said.
"There will be an Introduction to Systems Biology course that will bring computer science geeks who want to be brought up to speed in a kinder, gentler fashion than a regular biology course would," he said. "They may never become really good at these sorts of things, but they really need to understand them."
The students in the Introduction to Systems Biology course will collaborate on projects with students in a computer science sister course, Benfey said, adding that this will encourage interdisciplinary study.
"Working together within different disciplines is what we're all about," he said.
Although CSB has been functional for a month now, scientists are still unsure of the future of the relatively new field.
"Systems biology is an area of science that seems to have overlap with a number of different disciplines and over the next 10 years we may see it emerging as a field of its own," Socolar said. "We've all put a lot of work into this center, and now, we are eager to see how the interdisciplinary approach works."
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