Unraveling Entanglements

by SHAWN RYAN

Ever drop your headphones in your purse or push them into your pocket and, when you pull them out again, they are snarled in an inexplicable knot?

The scientific name for the condition is “entanglement.”

Yes, things like headphones get unscientifically tangled in life all the time, but it also happens at a cellular level. That’s where Eleni Panagiotou is focusing her attention.

Panagiotou, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, received a $537,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study entanglements for the next five years. She and undergraduate and graduate students from UTC will use math—in particular “topology,” an area typically characterized as pure mathematics— to help understand how entanglement affects cell material properties. Specifically, they will examine how the entanglement of biopolymers affects cell division.

Yes, “biopolymers.” DNA is a biopolymer. Proteins are biopolymers. Living things must have biopolymers to keep on living. They’re essential to cell division, but no one is quite sure how they work.

“During cell division, you have all these biopolymers, but somehow they push each other away to create this division of the cell,” Panagiotou explains. “So how this happens and what is the role of the entanglement complexity of these polymers, that is not understood, but we know it has an effect.”

Using the new mathematics created by her research, the result will advance the understanding of entanglement effects in the cell. In the long term, it could lead to understanding how to control and improve cell functions by measuring the amount of stress caused by entanglement in biopolymers and how that stress affects the push-pull of cell division.

“You have things pulling, contracting or things expanding somewhere in there,” she says. “All of this is getting some communication of stress. If it is pulling in, say, in one direction, pulling in the other direction. We want to actually measure what is the effect of entanglement.”

The data obtained will be loaded into the high-performance computers at the UTC Multidisciplinary Research Building, better known as the SimCenter, which can handle huge amounts of data and rapidly conduct research.

“Otherwise, it would be impossible to do this research here,” Panagiotou says. “We cannot do these simulations in a conventional computer. You actually need to use the computer clusters of the SimCenter.”

One outcome of her research could be a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, she says.

In the disease, brain cells separate— disentangle, in other words. No one knows why or if there is a way to prevent it or get them back together.

“They’re just hanging there, and they don’t even mingle with each other,” Panagiotou says.

Her research also could lead to a better understanding of some of the basic workings of life. Cells need to move around easily, but too much entanglement creates stiff cells that aren’t as efficient, she explains. But the cell has mechanisms to control and suppress entanglement to perform its functions and adapt to different environments efficiently.

“Understanding the role of entanglement in those systems and the transition from one state to the other would be very important,” she says. “It is to understand the mechanisms of life.”

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VISIT ELENIPANAGIOTOU.COM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE THEORY BEHIND THE RESEARCH, THE PEOPLE INVOLVED, AND NEWS AND EVENTS RELATED TO THE PROJECT.