Alex Mogilner says, “If the research is a great story — with a cool punch line — so that you can really explain it to people in plain words, then I like it.” (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
By the tail of a donkey
Alex Mogilner, seen here in Lhasa Square in Tibet, was guided to safety by a donkey in a snowstorm.
If there’s one thing Mogilner wants his students to understand, it’s that math is not an abstract concept separate from life sciences, but a handy instrument that can open up a world of discovery.
Prof fuses math, physics to unlock biology’s secrets
If you like your science all neat and tidy, Alex Mogilner may not be the man for you. But if you’re intrigued by the idea of combining sloppy math with biology and physics to study things like the shape of crawling keratocytes or the assembly of mitotic spindles, then keep reading.
Mogilner, a UC Davis professor with joint appointments in mathematics and neurobiology, physiology and behavior, is a mathematical biologist who views the math side of his profession as a tool to explore the biological side.
Well, it’s not quite that simple. Mogilner also holds a doctorate in physics, which provides yet another set of tools for solving the kinds of biological puzzles that strike his fancy.
“It is hard to say whether the tools I’m using are math or physics,” he says. “One definition is that I’m using sloppy math. As I see it, though, sloppy math is physics. So I guess I’m using a mixture.”
And if there’s one thing he wants his students to understand, it’s that math is not an abstract concept separate from life sciences, but a handy instrument that can open up a world of discovery.
Math for biologists
“Biology used to be this place you’d go if you didn’t want to do things that were quantitative,“ says Carl Boettiger, a graduate student in population biology.
Mathematics is central to Boettiger’s work, which includes developing fisheries models to help design effective marine reserves and modeling wildlife populations with the goal of preventing or mitigating damage from invasive species.
Mogilner was one of the lures that drew him to UC Davis. “Having a professor here who knows how to work at the interface of biology and mathematics can really help students get ahead, particularly in the biological sciences,” Boettiger explains.
One aspect of Mogilner’s teaching style that particularly impresses Boettiger is that he teaches math not for its own sake, but as a means to an end. “Dr. Mogilner focuses on the most applicable topics and illustrates their role in answering real biological questions,” he says. “And that’s very powerful.”
Scientific storyteller
With such a wide-ranging background, how does Mogilner choose his research projects?
“That’s not easy to answer,” he ventures. “Basically, it is the intuition that I’ve developed over many years. But there are a few areas I try to stick to. One is that the problem should be a really important biological question.”
Of course, it also has to be the kind of problem that lends itself to math.
“The old bread and butter of biology was to ask which proteins are involved in a specific process,” he explains. “This doesn’t require a quantitative approach. But if you are talking about some process which is happening in space and in time and if there is some mechanism you want to understand, then you have to think in mathematical terms.”
There’s one more thing, too.
“This last thing is very esoteric, very elusive,” he comments. “But if the research is a great story — with a cool punch line — so that you can really explain it to people in plain words, then I like it.”
Like two suns in a dividing cell
One of Mogilner’s pet projects is learning how the mitotic spindle is assembled. This is the molecular machine that pulls sister chromosomes apart from each other during the first stages of cell division, known as mitosis.
‘Dr. Mogilner focuses on the most applicable topics and illustrates their role in answering real biological questions. And that’s very powerful.’
Carl Boettiger, a graduate student in population biology
Named for the tapered rod used in spinning wool into yarn, the spindle is formed of a bundle of protein fibers, called microtubules, that narrows at both ends into a pair of small organs, the centrosomes.
“The centrosomes are pretty much like organizing centers from which microtubules periodically grow and shrink,” Mogilner says. “Crudely speaking, they are like two suns. And the microtubules are like rays of light coming from them.”
As the microtubules extend and contract, they probe the space around them, seemingly searching for chromosomes. “When they bump into one, they stick to it,” he explains. “Or as biologists say, ‘the microtubules capture the chromosomes.’”
Not until every chromosome is captured like this, does the spindle begin its job of segregating them into two daughter cells.
Biological computer games
In order to answer the long-standing question of whether the search for and capture of chromosomes occurs randomly, in 2005 Mogilner and his graduate student Roy Wollman wrote a code that allowed them to simulate every part of the process on a computer.
By observing how slowing or accelerating each step affected the entire process, they found that if search-and-capture was simply random, there would not be enough time for the spindle to assemble. Thus, some additional process had to be involved.
This micrograph shows chromosomes in blue being pulled apart by the mitotic spindle (green) in an early phase of mitosis. (Photo courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Image Science and Machine Vision unit)
Building on earlier speculation, Mogilner hypothesized that a cloud of a specific protein surrounding the chromosomes could be a mechanism that steers microtubules in their direction. This theoretical prediction was confirmed by an experimental group in Germany a few years later.
The work by Mogilner and his lab sent a ripple through the world of cell biology. It was cited in other research studies almost 100 times over the next three years and impacted the way scientists thought about mitosis. As just one example, says Ken Kaplan, professor of molecular and cellular biology, it promoted an understanding of the underlying causes of genomic instability in cancers.
Now Mogilner and his group think they’ve made a new discovery. Their models are showing that cells have to make compromises. “If spindle assembly is too fast, mistakes are made,” he says. “But if it’s flawless, the process is hopelessly slow. We still have more work to do, but we’re very excited about what we’re finding.”
School of hard knocks
Mogilner’s life was largely molded by his childhood in the Soviet Union. In that culture of suspicion and competition, children had a particularly difficult time, he says.
“It was a tough system,” he says. “For a weaker person, it was a complete disaster.”
While life was hard for the common person, it was even worse for people like Mogilner who had the word “Jew” stamped on the “ethnicity” line of their official I.D. card. The designation essentially barred him from many professions.
“Jewish kids were steered to a certain number of occupations,” he says. “If you did well at school, you went into science. When I was growing up in the ’70s, there was still this aura of nuclear reactors and the bomb, so lots of Jewish kids went into physics.”
Mogilner felt the nudge, too, and obtained his doctorate in physics in 1990 at the Ural Division of the Academy of Sciences in his hometown, the industrial city of Ekaterinburg, which had been renamed Sverdlovsk during the Soviet era.
New country, new career
But it took less than two years working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Manitoba to realize that the career he’d been prodded into was, for him, a scientific dead end.
Biology was a much stronger draw, so when he found a graduate program that combined math and biology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, he knew he’d found his calling.
And his students seem to agree.
“He has a sort of natural joy when he talks about research, or interesting questions. That’s really nice to see,” says Julia Svoboda, a graduate student in science education. “When you talk with him, his attitude and perspective make the work he does very accessible, and that makes it easy for students to imagine themselves in his role.”
In 1996, Mogilner joined the faculty of the math department at UC Davis, and six years later, not content to simply settle down, he spread his academic wings even further with a second appointment, in neurobiology.
Mogilner relaxes in a canoe on Brazil’s Rio Negro on one of his trips around the world. (Alex Mogilner/courtesy photo)
These days he defines what he’s doing as “computational biology,” mixing together physics, math, biology and chemistry to explore such puzzles as his mitotic spindles or how and why the cells that are liberated from a fish’s scales when the animal’s skin is cut start to move very fast, maintaining constant speed and a constant shape.
A travel bum
With so much science packed into this professor’s brain, you’d think there wouldn’t be room for much else.
But there’s another side to Alex Mogilner that he tucks away at the very bottom of his Web page, under a link that reads, “What I like to do is to travel the world.”
Click on it and you’ll find a trove of photos he’s taken from such far-flung places as Lhasa, India, Japan and Brazil. Or click on this link to read about an adventure he had a couple of years ago in Tibet.
How does he decide where to go?
“I like to be a bum when I travel. In Tibet, I basically slept with animals in their shelters,” he says. “I go anywhere, whether it’s dangerous or not, comfortable or not. The more exotic the better.”
It’s not hard to figure out his rationale. Surely it’s because those are the places where he finds the best stories … with the coolest punch lines.
On the UC Davis home page: Alex Mogilner is an inspiring role model for graduate students. Says Julia Svoboda, a graduate student in science education, “When you talk with him, his attitude and perspective make the work he does very accessible, and that makes it easy for students to imagine themselves in his role.” (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)