Project 5

Project 5   Cell-State Inference 

The internal structure of cells is highly sensitive to their external environment. We are building automated tools for inferring extracellular conditions from cell images, suitable for deploying in the field to analyze environmental toxins or pollutants, or equally to be deployed in an industrial setting to track conditions in fermentation processes.

The scientific vision of this project is to create a software platform for converting images of cells into estimates of cell environment and signaling state. Examples of research areas that would fit into the Cell State Inference Engine project include:

• Efforts to relate measures of the micro-environment to cell/tissue structure

• Building devices to monitor cell structure remotely

• Building computational models that relate cell structure to specific micro-environments or cell states (e.g. proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics)

• Chemical genetic studies that aim to relate the effects of a molecule/drug to a measurable change in cell/tissue structure