Quantitative Biology
Brains and artificial neural networks compute with continuous variables such as object position or stimulus orientation. However, the complex variability in neural responses makes it difficult to link internal representational structure to…
How do competing populations convert a spatial advantage into macroscopic dominance? We introduce a stochastic model for resource competition that decouples the transient discovery phase from monopolization. Initial symmetry breaking is…
Trigger waves are self-regenerating propagating fronts that emerge from the coupling of nonlinear reaction kinetics and diffusion. In cells, trigger waves coordinate large-scale processes such as mitotic entry and stress responses. Although…
Animal brains flexibly and efficiently achieve many behavioral tasks with a single neural network. A core goal in modern neuroscience is to map the mechanisms of the brain's flexibility onto the dynamics underlying neural populations.…
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed young people to a prolonged and evolving societal stressor, yet it remains unclear whether symptom networks were reorganized or whether control was redistributed across a conserved modular scaffold. Here we…
Recovering a tree that represents the evolutionary history of a group of species is a key task in phylogenetics. Performing this task using sequence data from multiple genetic markers poses two key challenges. The first is the discordance…
We investigate single-cell directional sensing from diffusing chemoattractant signals released by a localized source. We focus on the low-concentration regime in which receptor activity is discrete and cellular decisions are made on…
Due to its ability to summarise 'real-time' epidemic behaviour, the time-dependent reproduction number, Rt, is a useful metric for tracking pathogen transmission and quantifying the effects of interventions during infectious disease…
We revisit the controversial "abscopal" effect in the context of Personalized Ultra-Fractionated Stereotactic Adaptive Radiotherapy (PULSAR). By allowing long interval between fractions, PULSAR may enhance systemic immune activation and…
Collective motion in animals and cells often exhibits rapid reorientations and scale-free velocity correlations. This allows information to spread rapidly through the group, allowing an adequate collective response to environmental changes…
Computing haplotypes from sequencing data, i.e. haplotype assembly, is an important component of molecular and population genetics problems, including interpreting the effects of genetic variation on complex traits and reconstructing…
Understanding how neural populations in higher visual areas encode object-centered visual information remains a central challenge in computational neuroscience. Prior works have investigated representational alignment between artificial…
Eutrophication and harmful algal blooms, driven by complex interactions among nutrients and climate, threaten freshwater ecosystems globally, particularly in densely populated Asian regions where rapid urbanization and agricultural…
The process of programmed cell death, namely apoptosis, is a natural mechanism that regulates healthy tissue, multicellular structures, and homeostasis. An improved understanding of apoptosis can significantly enhance our knowledge of…
Since early 2024, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV) H5N1 of clade 2.3.4.4b has spilled over from wild birds to dairy cattle in the United States (U.S.), spreading to more than 1000 herds and threatening both animal and public…
BEFANA is a free and open-source software tool for ecological network analysis and visualisation. It is adapted to ecologists' needs and allows them to study the topology and dynamics of ecological networks as well as apply selected machine…
In genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of common diseases/traits, we often analyze multiple GWASs with the same phenotype together to discover associated genetic variants with higher power. Since it is difficult to access data with…
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are widely used to discover genetic variants associated with diseases. To control false positives, all findings from GWAS need to be verified with additional evidences, even for associations discovered…
Protein function is executed at the molecular surface, where shape and chemistry act together to govern interaction. Yet most comparison methods treat these aspects separately, privileging either global fold or local descriptors and missing…
We present a mathematical model of the curvature blindness illusion in which sinusoids appear as angular zigzags when drawn with alternating contrast polarity against a gray background. The model identifies two complementary mechanisms,…