Cross-disciplinary initiative on the dynamical foundations of biological and prebiological phenomena

This coordinated project is part of solid collaborative efforts that the two teams have built over the years aiming to unravel the fundamental role that dynamics hydrodynamics play in biological and pre-biotic phenomena at different scales. The general approach of this research, whose continuity is proposed, is the use of the methods of dynamical systems theory to describe various biological processes with models of qualitative nature but designed to produce rigorous quantitative predictions of new biological facts. This approach aims to the development of an alternative mathematical framework for biology as a whole based on this central scheme, but through the cumulative contribution of its application to a choice of concrete intrinsically relevant problems from biology that are especially well adaptated to this approach. Such examples or lines of research include the study of a) the structure of the genetic code, b) the workings of the hearing apparatus in different species, c) the presence of dynamic self-organized criticality in various homeostatic phenomena that occur in neural tissues and the brain, d) biomineralization processes and formation of nacre formation and evolution of quimiobriónicos, e) dynamic and hydrodynamic principles responsible for embryonic development, f) natatory dynamics of microorganisms both at individual and collective scales, g) cell division phenomena and their connection with aging, etc. This strategy has produced significant advances in the past, when applied to solving longstanding riddles on hearing and embryology and it reaches its maximum power in close cooperation with experimental research. Often, this approach also requires concurrence of basic research in dynamics as well as the development of new methods and techniques in this field in parallel with the biological part of the work. That was the case, for example, when an appropriate theory for dynamical systems with three frequencies was developed in order to describe perceptual phenomena in the auditory system, or when the concept of dynamic self-organized criticality was introduced as the possible generic mechanism of homeostasis. Thus, the marriage between dynamics and biology is expected to produce progress both in the theoretical foundations of dynamics and in the biological phenomena under scrutiny. With this framework in mind, this proposal put forward a distribution of efforts balancing the development of appropriate physical and mathematical tools with theoretical and experimental research on the biological problems.