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EXC 2068:  Physics of Life: The Dynamic Organization of Living Matter (PoL)

Subject Area Statistical Physics, Nonlinear Dynamics, Complex Systems, Soft and Fluid Matter, Biological Physics
Basic Research in Biology and Medicine
Term since 2019
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390729961
 
Identifying the physical principles that govern life remains one of the biggest scientific challenges. The key question was elegantly stated by Erwin Schrödinger in his book What is Life back in 1944: "How can the events that take place in space and time and within a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?". Despite major advances in biology and physics in the last decades, it is still unclear what the characteristics of the living state of matter are and how complex spatiotemporal organization emerges in living systems. Fulfilling Schrödinger’s vision is a long-term endeavor that inspires our Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) and that requires an interdisciplinary approach. Motivated by this vision, our overarching aim is to identify the physical principles that govern the dynamic organization of living matter. In the first funding phase (PoL1), we took the relation between physics and biology to a new level by identifying physical principles that underlie fundamental biological questions. For example, we discovered nuclear jamming transitions that govern tissue organization as well as capillary forces and pre-wetting transitions that organize chromatin structure. In addition, our achievements highlighted two signature features of living systems, function and robustness, that need to be connected to physical principles to uncover what brings matter to life. Connecting physical principles to function and robustness will be a key focus of the next funding phase (PoL2). To this end, we will investigate the emergence of robust functional structures through flows of matter, energy and information. This requires integrating molecular, cellular and tissue scales through cross-scale feedback, a key feature of living matter. We will introduce new measurement techniques to remove existing roadblocks towards a physical characterization of intact living systems. Moreover, we will employ topological data analysis and machine learning approaches to extract essential information from complex and high-dimensional datasets. This will transform our understanding of cell and developmental biology and unravel new paradigms for understanding the physical basis of life. PoL is a flagship research center of TUD, and, in its next phase, will transition into its own new building at the core of the planned Interdisciplinary School of Life Sciences at TUD. The PoL building will host the 13 Professors and Group Leaders that were newly recruited to PoL. Our interdisciplinary approaches, technological advances, and structural innovations at PoL, are pushing a revolution towards understanding life as a physical process, thereby bringing physics to life.
DFG Programme Clusters of Excellence (ExStra)
Applicant Institution Technische Universität Dresden
 
 

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