Related papers: Are biological systems poised at criticality?
Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a…
Complex macroscopic behaviour can arise in many-body systems with only very simple elements as a consequence of the combination of competition and inhomogeneity. This paper attempts to illustrate how statistical physics has driven this…
We investigate the dynamics of two models of biological networks with purely suppressive interactions between the units; species interacting via niche competition and neurons via inhibitory synaptic coupling. In both of these cases,…
A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a range…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
Network structure strongly constrains the range of dynamic behaviors available to a complex system. These system dynamics can be classified based on their response to perturbations over time into two distinct regimes, ordered or chaotic,…
Recent genomic and bioinformatic advances have motivated the development of numerous random network models purporting to describe graphs of biological, technological, and sociological origin. The success of a model has been evaluated by how…
A critical task in systems biology is the identification of genes that interact to control cellular processes by transcriptional activation of a set of target genes. Many methods have been developed to use statistical correlations in…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
In the course of evolution, proteins undergo important changes in their amino acid sequences, while their three-dimensional folded structure and their biological function remain remarkably conserved. Thanks to modern sequencing techniques,…
Biological activities are often seen entrained onto the day-night and other celestial mechanical cycles (e.g., seasonal and lunar), but studies on the origin of life have largely not accounted for such periodic external environmental…
Biology-derived algorithms are an important part of computational sciences, which are essential to many scientific disciplines and engineering applications. Many computational methods are derived from or based on the analogy to natural…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…
In principle, all the natural systems such as biological, ecological and economical systems are structure-variable systems (in which some environment parameters are not fixed). In this Letter we show that data sequences from many…
Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are…
Ordered chains (such as chains of amino acids) are ubiquitous in biological cells, and these chains perform specific functions contingent on the sequence of their components. Using the existence and general properties of such sequences as a…
Global climate change, extreme climate events, earthquakes and their accompanying natural disasters pose significant risks to humanity. Yet due to the nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions and complex structure of the Earth system,…