Sgro Lands NSF 10 Big Ideas Grant
Funding will help explore messaging behind organisms’ collective behavior
Allyson Sgro, a Boston University College of Engineering assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has been awarded a two-year, $150,000 grant under the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 10 Big Ideas program to elucidate how cells work together to form groups. Sgro will use the grant to study how cells use both short- and long-range communication to do things like synchronize behaviors. She will also work with a collaborator at Princeton University to build a mathematical model of how feedback between these types of communication allow individuals in groups to coordinate their behavior.
“One of the goals of the Biological Design Center at BU, which I am a part of, is to understand life’s design principles,” says Sgro. “When I saw this call for proposals I realized that my work and the Center’s goal fit perfectly.”
Researchers in Sgro’s lab will use the social amoeba, a long-standing model organism for collective behavior whose cells communicate through a molecule that is used for communication inside the cells of many organisms. Because it is a common signaling molecule, there are existing sensors that the researchers can reengineer to visualize long-range communication dynamics between cells. The short-range communication will be mapped by visualizing how the cells control how well they stick together when they interact and touch each other.
Sgro hopes that with a mathematical framework that captures how single cells use feedback to work together in groups, they will be able to identify general practices by which all organisms control group behavior.
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