Indika Rajapakse, Ph.D., is a believer. The engineer and mathematician now find himself a biologist. And he believes the beauty of blending these three disciplines is crucial to unraveling how cells work. His latest development is a new mathematical technique to begin to understand how a cell’s nucleus is organized. The technique, which Rajapakse and collaborators tested on several types of cells, revealed what the researchers termed self-sustaining transcription clusters, a subset of proteins that play a key role in maintaining cell identity. They hope this understanding will expose vulnerabilities that can be targeted to reprogram a cell to stop cancer or other diseases. “More and more cancer biologists think genome organization plays a huge role in understanding uncontrollable cell division and whether we can reprogram a cancer cell. That means we need to understand more detail about what’s happening in the nucleus,” said Rajapakse, associate professor of computational medicine and bioinformatics, mathematics, and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan.
“Life is a math equation. In order to gain the most, you have to know how to convert negatives into positives.” Logan Newman (10) said.
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