Duke University is joining the Center for Genome Intelligence Engineering, a five-year national research centre based at Northwestern University and supported by a $30 million award from the US National Science Foundation. The collaboration draws together engineers, biologists, physicists, artificial intelligence specialists and clinicians around a deceptively simple question: how do the three-dimensional shape of the genome, and the physical forces acting within DNA, govern what cells become and how they behave?
Duke's contribution runs through its biomedical engineering strength. Tatiana Segura, whose laboratory designs biomaterials that coax damaged brain tissue to repair itself, and Nenad Bursac, known for growing functional human heart and muscle tissue, will supply the experimental models on which the centre's scientists test their ideas. The Duke effort focuses on heart and brain cells, tissues that do not naturally regenerate and are notoriously difficult to repair once injured.
The centre's ambition is to understand how genome architecture shapes cell identity, how cells respond to their surroundings, and how they keep biological memories of past experience. If those rules can be written down, they could eventually be engineered: a route towards repairing damaged tissue and fighting disease at the level of the genome's physical organisation, rather than its sequence alone.