Related papers: On the evolution of differentiated multicellularit…
Mathematical models are vital interpretive and predictive tools used to assist in the understanding of cell migration. There are typically two approaches to modelling cell migration: either micro-scale, discrete or macro-scale, continuum.…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
Cells coexist together in colonies or as tissues. Their behaviour is controlled by an interplay between intercellular forces and biochemical regulation. We develop a simple model of the cell cycle, the fundamental regulatory network…
This paper presents an interesting experimental example of voter-model statistics in biology. In recent work on mouse tail-skin, where proliferating cells are confined to a two-dimensional layer, we showed that cells proliferate and…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
The fundamental understanding of how cells physically interact with each other and their environment is key to understanding their organisation in living tissues. Over the past decades several computational methods have been developed to…
The evolution of complex cellular life involved two major transitions: the encapsulation of self-replicating genetic entities into cellular units and the aggregation of individual genes into a collectively replicating genome. In this paper,…
We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…
Sporulation in Bacillus subtilis serves as a paradigm for the development of two different cell types (mother cell and prespore) from a single cell. The mechanism by which the two different developmental programs are initiated has been much…
Many cellular processes involve information processing and decision making. We can probe these processes at increasing molecular detail. The analysis of heterogeneous data remains a challenge that requires new ways of thinking about cells…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
We present models and computational results which indicate that the spatial and temporal regularity seen in Proteus mirabilis swarm-colony development is largely an expression of a sharp age of dedifferentiation in the cell cycle from…
Extensive research shows that more species-rich assemblages are generally more productive and efficient in resource use than comparable assemblages with fewer species. But the question of how diversity simultaneously affects the wide…
Cell differentiation in multicellular organisms is a complex process whose mechanism can be understood by a reductionist approach, in which the individual processes that control the generation of different cell types are identified.…
The immune response to a pathogen has two basic features. The first is the expansion of a few pathogen-specific cells to form a population large enough to control the pathogen. The second is the process of differentiation of cells from an…
In past work, we developed a computational model of the evolution of symbiotic entities (Model-S), based on Conway's Game of Life. In this article, we examine three trends that biologists have observed in the evolution of symbiotes. (1)…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
Bacteria are easily characterizable model organisms with an impressively complicated set of capabilities. Among their capabilities is quorum sensing, a detailed cell-cell signaling system that may have a common origin with eukaryotic…
The interplay between energy efficiency and evolutionary mechanisms is addressed. One important question is how evolutionary mechanisms can select for the optimised usage of energy in situations where it does not lead to immediate…