megachilerotundata pupa

Bio-inspiration from micro-fluidics in the insect tracheal system

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Participants
Art Woods, University of Montana, organismal biologist
Shahriar Afkami, New Jersey Institute of Technology, computational and mathematical modeling
Kendra Greenlee, North Dakota State University, organismal biologist

Summary
The respiratory system of insects is evolved to deal with water in the tracheae. Our short term goals are to develop the model for fluid movement and prepare the first manuscript stemming from this project. Our long-term goals are to 1) understand the surface properties of the tracheal system that make it amenable to liquid movement, 2) identify the routes of liquid movement through the tracheal system, and 3) determine the mechanism of liquid movement using x-ray imaging.

Please contact Kendra Greenlee kendra.greenlee@ndsu.edu for more information about this research exchange.

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grass hopper

Building predictive models for the development of respiratory function

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Participants
Noah Cowan, Johns Hopkins University, engineer and organismal biologist
Kendra Greenlee, North Dakota State University, organismal biologist
Kristi Montooth, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, organismal biologist

Summary
Greenlee, Montooth & Helm (2014) made the case that the development of insect respiratory structures and the underlying metabolism is an excellent system to investigate how organisms walk the tightrope between stability and change. Regulatory feedback is certainly working to maintain stability and elicit change in this system. The challenge, however, is that the timescale of this feedback is much slower relative to the nearly instantaneous feedback control that Dr. Cowan has been quantitatively and predictively modeling using control theory (Cowan et al. 2014).

Drs. Cowan, Greenlee and Montooth propose a workshop to envision what data would need to be collected to use the control theory framework to build predictive models of how the processes underlying the ontogeny of metabolic rate are regulated in response to the environment to maintain respiratory performance during insect development.

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