Interdisciplinary methods to study the impact of heterogeneity in living systems across scales
Dr. Pedro D. Manrique
, Florida Polytechnic University
Abstract:
Dynamical grouping underlies a myriad of collective phenomena across the physical, biological, chemical, economic, and social sciences. Though many theories have been developed to date, the significant heterogeneity found in real-world populations of living objects is often ignored. In the first part of this seminar, I will present a mathematical framework that integrates growth dynamics and single-cell heterogeneity within the context of bacterial survival and resistance against drugs. The resultant approach produces testable outputs and reveals collective effects with key implications for fitness and survival of the colony. Complementary to this effort, a data-driven approach aimed at identifying molecular properties that are indicative of outer membrane (OM) permeation/inhibition in Gram-negative Pseudomonas aeruginosa will be presented. This approach combines detailed experimental, as well as, computational data from a diverse library of 1260 molecules that can be classified in 16 distinct structural chemotypes. The resultant analysis sheds new light on the key molecular properties drug candidates should have to effectively permeate the OM and inhibit P. aeruginosa, and opens the door to similar data-driven studies in other Gram-negative pathogens. The second part of the seminar touches on the formulation of a new non-equilibrium physical theory of multi-species cohesion that is applied to the problem of protein aggregation in biomolecular condensates. The theory yields results in good agreement with recent empirical data and reveals a new inhibitory role for biomolecular condensates in the formation of dangerous amyloid fibrils, which are linked to degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The theory is formulated in a generic manner in order to analyze universal behaviors across a wide range of complex systems.
Speaker’s Bio:
Dr. Pedro D. Manrique is a theoretical and computational physicist with expertise in mathematical modeling and data analysis of real-world complex dynamical systems. He is originally from Bogotá, Colombia, where he obtained a bachelors and a master degree at the Universidad de Los Andes. In 2015 he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Miami, where he developed theoretical and computational methods to study complex systems ranging from physical (e.g., quantum thermalization), life science (e.g., bacterial photosynthesis) and up to social systems (e.g., conflict modeling). After a postdoctoral assignment at the University of Miami working in a kinetic description of online networks and a game-theory modeling of klinotaxis in simple organisms, he was awarded the Los Alamos National Laboratory Director’s postdoctoral fellowship in 2019. While at LANL, he worked in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group in multi-scale modeling of biosystems within the context of antimicrobial resistance. In 2021 he joined The George Washington University as a Research Scientist to continue his research in the science of online behavior and protein aggregation. In August of 2024, he joined the department of Physics at Florida Polytechnic University as a Visiting Faculty and will be appointed Research Assistant Professor at The George Washington University next month.
