Researchers at the University of California San Diego have built digital models that imitate the changing inner life of a cell. Their work was described by UC San Diego Today on September 17.
The team used four-dimensional microscopy, which records movement in three dimensions over time, to watch mitochondria as they moved and changed inside living cells.
One artificial-intelligence model learned from 40,000 cell movies and grouped medicines by the way they affected cells. A second model, called a digital twin, recreated the physical behavior of a real cancer cell and matched how it responded to a drug.
Together, the tools could help researchers test ideas more efficiently while studying conditions including cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and rare mitochondrial disorders.
