Part of BIO5, the Quantitative Biology Consortium at the University of Arizona is a campus-wide interdisciplinary effort, in which the tools of mathematics, physics, computation and statistics are used in combination with biological approaches to understand the fundamental principles of life and their implications for human health and disease.

Research highlight: How do networks of blood vessels organize themselves?

The smallest blood vessels, the microcirculation, form a complex network that is capable of continuous structural adaptation in response to changing conditions. This process strongly influences the body's responses to heart disease, stroke, hypertension and cancer. UA researcher Dr. Timothy W. Secomb, working in collaboration with Dr. Axel R. Pries and colleagues at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, has developed a theoretical framework for understanding the basic rules that underlie this process. According to their theory, each blood vessel changes its diameter and wall thickness in response to forces on the wall generated by blood pressure (circumferential stress, color-coded in upper panel) and blood flow (shear stress, lower panel). (See Pries et al., Hypertension 2005, 46:725-731.)