The Cluster of Excellence SCALE – SubCellular Architecture of LifE aims to build digital models of human cellular segments in molecular detail, allowing them to evolve in virtual reality through advanced simulations. To launch the Cluster, we organize a Kick-Off jointly with the Giersch International Conference entitled "Towards Digital Twins for Structural Cell Biology - Criteria, Chances and Challenges”.
The Giersch International Conference series at FIAS (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) was established in 2016 and generously funded by the Giersch Foundation. The conference series focuses on interdisciplinary topics, bringing together leading experts to discuss with young scientists at FIAS.
Digital Twins for Structural Cell Biology – Criteria, Chances and Challenges
Originally emerging from industry and engineering, digital twins are now set to enter the field of natural sciences. With their aim to offer real interrogability akin to true experimental conditions, but with much higher controllability and reproducibility, digital twins promise to overcome existing experimental frontiers and to facilitate mechanistic insights to both theorists and experimentalists. The ongoing integration of classical simulation techniques and more recent AI-based approaches further enhances these innovative opportunities.
However, creating digital twins of natural systems is challenging due to their inherent complexity and stochasticity. Unlike in industrial applications, where components are well characterized, the structure and function of natural system components are often hardly known and itself subject to investigation. Moreover, creation of numerically efficient digital twins requires careful, system-specific abstraction of natural complexity while retaining mechanistic interrogability. These difficulties call for new approaches and a thorough balancing of existing methodology.
This conference will bring together leading experts engaging in digital twin development for structural cell biology. We will identify challenges and concepts in digital twin implementation and attempt to establish a comprehensive catalog of criteria for the next generation of high-quality digital twins for structural cell biology – an important goal of the Cluster of Excellence SCALE.
Topical sessions:
- Computational Approaches for Digital Twins
- Digital Twins of Subcellular Segments
- Digital Twins of Multicellular Systems
- Digital Twins of Neural Systems
