March 18, 2025.  Dr. Eran Agmon recently presented his research at the AFOSR-sponsored workshop, Advancing Space Biotechnology through Whole-Cell Models and Functional Annotation. The symposium brought together leaders in synthetic biology, genomics, and computational modeling to explore how whole-cell models can drive innovation in space-based biotechnology. Dr. Agmon presented his work on building a multiscale simulation of Escherichia coli, using the Vivarium framework. The platform integrates diverse submodels—spanning gene regulation, metabolism, and cell growth—into an extensible whole-cell simulation environment. His presentation highlighted how Vivarium’s architecture supports interoperability across simulation methods, paving the way for next-generation virtual cells that can inform biomanufacturing to support long-term space missions.

February 28, 2025. The 26th Computational Cell Biology workshop took place ONLINE for the 5 days, February 24-28th. Cell biologists and biophysicists leaned how to use VCell (https://vcell.org/), COPASI (https://copasi.org/ ) and SpringSalad (https://vcell.org/ssalad) software to develop spatial and non-spatial models using deterministic, stochastic, agent- and rule-based approaches.

February 4, 2025. Dr. Blinov’s publication in NPJ Systems Biology and Applications details how to use AI tools to investigate systems biology resources related to mathematical modeling: Kannan, M., Bridgewater, G., Zhang, M., & Blinov, M. L. (2025). Leveraging public AI tools to explore systems biology resources in mathematical modeling. npj Systems Biology and Applications, 11(1), 15: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41540-025-00496-z

Remarkably, Meera Kannan and Gabrielle Bridgewater are two high school student interns who worked on this project under Dr. Blinov’s supervision during the

January 22, 2025. A collaboration led by Kazunori Hoshino lab in UConn Storrs, Kshitiz lab at CCAM tested how human endometrial cells change their mechanics in anticipation of decidualization. A recent paper published in Advanced Materials Technologies describes how cells become stiffer, but amazingly, when cells from placenta interact with them, they reverse this stiffening.

January 21, 2025. Dr. Ji Yu is part of the team that recently published PNAS paper on how CFTR impacts monocyte adhesion. Mutations in CFTR contribute to inflammatory pathogenesis of cystic fibrosis. The study utilized super-resolution microscopy to show that the mutations caused defects in integrin clustering but not their activations.