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Officially, our group at Heidelberg will start on February 1 2005. Our areas of expertise are theoretical physics, statistical mechanics, theory of soft matter physics, biological physics and cell biology. The main objective of our group is to obtain a systems level understanding of cell adhesion. Cell adhesion is of fundamental importance in a multicellular organisms, in which most cell types either stick to each other or to the extracellular matrix. The magic of cell adhesion is that it has to accomplish two seemingly contradictory objectives at the same time. On the one hand, cell communities have to keep their connectivity in order to maintain structural integrity. On the other hand, they have to be able to react quickly to changes in their environment, for example to wounds or infections. The solution to this problem is continuous remodelling of cell-cell and cell-matrix contacts and the structures they attach to (extracellular matrix and cytoskeleton). In our work, we aim at developing a quantitative modelling framework which allows to treat biochemical and structural aspects of cell adhesion on an equal footing. Such a framework has to integrate the effects of signal transduction, cytoskeletal dynamics, molecular motor activity, adhesion cluster dynamics, and the extracellular matrix.
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