Quantitative Biology
Functional MRI is a neuroimaging technique that analyzes the functional activity of the brain by measuring blood-oxygen-level-dependent signals throughout the brain. The derived functional features can be used for investigating brain…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…
Single-cell omics technologies have transformed our understanding of cellular diversity by enabling high-resolution profiling of individual cells. However, the unprecedented scale and heterogeneity of these datasets demand robust frameworks…
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted a benefit-risk assessment for Moderna's COVID vaccine mRNA-1273 prior to its full approval, announced 1/31/2022. The FDA's assessment focused on males of ages 18-64 years…
The Collaborative Research Center for Everyday Activity Science & Engineering (CRC EASE) aims to enable robots to perform environmental interaction tasks with close to human capacity. It therefore employs a shared ontology to model the…
The brain interprets visual information through learned regularities, a computation formalized as probabilistic inference under a prior. The visual cortex establishes priors for this inference, some delivered through established top-down…
Biological neural networks (BNNs) are increasingly explored for their rich dynamics, parallelism, and adaptive behavior. Beyond understanding their function as a scientific endeavour, a key focus has been using these biological systems as a…
Homologous proteins have similar three-dimensional structures and biological functions that shape their sequences. The resulting coevolution-driven correlations underlie methods from Potts models to AlphaFold, which infer protein structure…
Epidemic and pandemic preparedness with rapid outbreak response rely on timely, trustworthy evidence. Mathematical models are crucial for supporting timely and reliable evidence generation for public health decision-making with models…
On exposure to 1,2-propanediol (1,2-PD), Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium LT2 produces 1,2-PD utilization (Pdu) microcompartments (MCPs), nanoscale protein-bound shells that encapsulate metabolic enzymes. MCPs serve as a…
Modeling peptide cyclization is critical for the virtual screening of candidate peptides with desirable physical and pharmaceutical properties. This task is challenging because a cyclic peptide often exhibits diverse, ring-shaped…
How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulation of biological systems presents significant computational challenges, particularly for applications involving large structural deformations and contact mechanics, such as heart valve dynamics.…
Synthetic molecular communication (MC) in the cardiovascular system is a key enabler for many envisioned medical applications inside the human body, such as targeted drug delivery, early disease detection, and continuous health monitoring.…
This study investigates how listeners perceive consonance and dissonance in dyads composed of simple (sine) tones, focusing on the effects of frequency ratio ($R$) and mean frequency ($F$). Seventy adult participants - categorized by…
Integration and analysis of multi-omics data provide valuable insights for improving cancer subtype classification. However, such data are inherently heterogeneous, high-dimensional, and exhibit complex intra- and inter-modality…
Foundation models are transforming neuroscience but are often prohibitively large, data-hungry, and difficult to deploy. Here, we introduce BrainSymphony, a lightweight and parameter-efficient foundation model with plug-and-play integration…
Chemical language models (CLMs) are increasingly used for molecular design and property prediction. Because these models learn from textual encodings of molecules, differences in how such encodings are generated may affect their behavior.…
We develop a neurogeometric model for the arm area of motor cortex, which encodes complex motor primitives, ranging from simple movement features like movement direction, to short hand trajectories, termed fragments, and ultimately to more…
Spoken language is often, if not always, understood in a context formed by the identity of the speaker. For example, we can easily make sense of an utterance such as "I'm going to have a manicure this weekend" or "The first time I got…