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Takamatsu Lab
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Doing biology through mathematics: unraveling the lively workings of living things.
AboutAbout the lab
Doing biology through mathematics
The Takamatsu Lab uses mathematics and physics to investigate the mechanisms of biological phenomena that cannot be understood from genetic information alone.
The lab regards life as a system that behaves dynamically, and believes that, in addition to information about its parts, it is necessary to understand how that system operates.
The lab aims to understand, through both experiments and theory, the dynamics that arise when components come together and interact with one another.
The subjects differ from theme to theme, but they all share the approach of understanding biological phenomena from a mathematical standpoint.
Key terms
- Plasmodium of a true slime mold
- A large, amoeba-like single-celled organism that has thousands of nuclei within a single cell
- Network morphology
- The pattern in which the transport tubes running through a slime mold cell are connected
- Mathematical model
- A description of how a phenomenon works in mathematical equations, so that its behavior can be followed by calculation
ResearchResearch themes
Recent advances in molecular biology have yielded a great deal of information about the components that make up living organisms. The Takamatsu Lab aims to understand the behavior of biological systems of interacting elements through both experiments and theory, from the perspectives of physics, mathematics, complex systems science, and nonlinear science.
*Illustrative imageSlime mold
The plasmodium of a true slime mold is a large single-celled organism with thousands of nuclei in one cell, and it has a well-developed network of transport tubes that carry nutrients and oxygen inside the cell. The lab has shown that this tube network spreads out as a dense mesh in good environments and as a tree-like structure in poor ones. The lab is continuing its research on the view that this morphology also holds a memory function that stores periodic changes.
*Illustrative imageCyanobacteria
A collective has functions that let it exert abilities beyond what a single individual can achieve. Motile cyanobacteria attract one another, and spontaneously form circular groups that rotate in place as well as comet-like groups that move in translation. Circular groups are suited to cell proliferation, while comet-shaped groups are suited to finding new, favorable environments.
*Illustrative imageCells
Even epithelial cells cultured in the same environment show a variety of shapes and motility, such as round, spindle-shaped, and D-shaped. The lab built a mechanical model consisting only of fibers and particles corresponding to the cytoskeleton and focal adhesions, and showed mathematically that even this simple model spontaneously produces diverse morphologies and motility.
MembersFaculty
The members of the Takamatsu Lab consist of faculty members, master's students, and undergraduate students.
- ProfessorAtsuko Takamatsu
VoicesStudent voices
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Report an errorAbout the images
The top and research theme images are illustrative and were not taken at the lab. They are cropped from Wikimedia Commons images. Cropped CC BY-SA images are provided under the same CC BY-SA license as the original (version shown on each line).
- Top image: “Dictyostelium Late Aggregation 1” Bruno in Columbus / Public domain (cropped)
- Slime mold: “Physarum polycephalum” HelenGinger / CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)
- Cyanobacteria: “Cyanobacteria guerrero negro” NASA / Public domain (cropped)
- Cells: “Icosahedral tensegrity structure” QuarterNotes / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Wasa Lab): “Kilobot robot swarm” asuscreative / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
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