DawnWalker (Dawn Wood),Sun Tao, Alan Waterworth, Jiujiang Zhu, Phil McMinn, Simon Coakley, NikGeorgopoulos, Steven Wood, Andrew Leathard The aim of theEpitheliome Project is to developa computational model that is ableto predict the social behaviour of cells in epithelial tissues.
Epithelial tissues form the barriers between usand the outside world - our skin, the lining of all our body cavities(mouth,lungs, cervix, bladder, prostate gland, our intestines). They are verythin -typically about 0.5 mm thick, perhaps 10 cells - but have specialisedfunctions. Key to epithelial behaviour is the protective barrierfunctioncoupled with enormous repair potential. Thus skin prevents usdehydrating andprotects us from disease organisms, the bladder epithelium (theurothelium) iswatertight and prevents urine damage or contamination of circulatingblood, the lining of our intestinesprotects us from potentially damaging ingested material (eg bacteria)whileselectively absorbing nutrients. It is not surprising giving the roleofepithelia and their proliferative potential that all cancers, otherthan thoseoriginating from haemopoietic and mesenchymal cells, originate inepithelialtissues, which are relatively simple.
Epithelial tissues are obviously important - we can't live withoutthem! They are also relatively simple - they contain a limited numberof different cell types, no blood vessels, no nerve endings. They arethe source of important clinical problems - cancer, wound healing,diabetic ulcers, skin graft contraction. The ultimate aim of ourmodelling is to better understand these problems, and thus be able todo something about them.
All the tissues in our bodies (to be more general, all multi-cellularcreatures) self-assemble. The 'rules' for doing this are in each cell -in the genetic material. There is no information at a higher level oforganisation than the individual cell, so all the organisation intissues and organs and organisms is an 'emergent property' of theinteraction of large numbers of individual cells - 1013 in a human.That is what we are interested in - how doesthis social interaction of the cells produce properly functioning andstructured creatures?
There is a lot more about the project on the EpitheliomeProject web pages - models, publications, and links to otherinteresting sites.
