Resilience in living systems.

Resilience—the ability to ‘bounce back’—is a fundamental signature of healthy biological systems. Reliance can describe how cells and organisms recover from stress and injury, how ecosystems survive climate change and how some humans elude the degenerative changes of aging.  Yet, what makes a system resilient, and even whether disparate systems have common resilience mechanisms, is not known. We propose the creation of a center to develop an interdisciplinary framework to study universal indicators of resilience, leveraging high-resolution omics data, and advances in systems biology, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and Artificial Intelligence. This center would be unique in US and would offer the opportunity to combine the best of UI expertise and talent in AI/machine learning and basic biology (broadly defined and including areas of research in cell biology, aging, neurodegeneration, genomics, and population genetics and speciation).