Faglige nøgleord: Biological Decision Making, Mathematics & Modeling, Machine Learning, Cellular Energy, Sustainable Production, Bioplastics, Future of Food
Oplæg tilgængeligt på: Engelsk og kinesisk
If you want to get from home to school, you have choices. You could bike (cheap but slow), take a car (fast but expensive), or sprint (very fast but you’ll be exhausted). Every choice has a cost, a speed, and a reason.
Cells do the exact same thing when they "eat" sugar. There are many different routes (pathways) a cell can take to turn sugar into energy. Usually, cells are efficient. But sometimes, they do something that seems totally nonsensical: they choose a "messy" and wasteful route, throwing away half their food as trash. This is called overflow metabolism, and it’s found in everything from aggressive cancer cells to the yeast in bread.
But why? Why would nature choose to be inefficient?
In this presentation, we will look at the cell as a tiny business manager trying to balance its books. We will explore:
The Route Game: An interactive exercise where students have to choose different "paths" to move energy. They will discover that sometimes, being "wasteful" is actually a clever trick to survive in a crowded environment.
The Math Behind the Mystery: I’ll show how we use mathematics to map these routes. When the "map" gets too complicated for us to draw by hand, I use Machine Learning to help find the hidden logic in the cell’s behavior.
My Journey to DTU: I’ll share how I went from a high school student to a PhD researcher, and how I realized that biology is actually just very complex, beautiful math.
Why should we care? If we can calculate why a cell makes a certain decision, we can stop cancer cells from growing, create "green" bacteria that turn waste into bioplastics, or even design new ways to grow the food of the future.