Related papers: Living Devices
Scientists have long sought to understand how vascular networks supply blood and oxygen to cells throughout the body. Recent work focuses on principles that constrain how vessel size changes through branching generations from the aorta to…
Biomaterial systems have allowed for the in vitro production of complex, emergent tissue behaviors that were not possible with conventional 2D culture systems allowing for analysis of the normal development as well as disease processes. We…
A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…
Mathematical modelling allows us to concisely describe fundamental principles in biology. Analysis of models can help to both explain known phenomena, and predict the existence of new, unseen behaviours. Model analysis is often a complex…
Mathematical models are increasingly a part of microbiological research. Here, we share our perspective on how modeling advances the discipline by: (i) enforcing logical consistency, (ii) enabling quantitative prediction, (iii) extracting…
Recent experimental and theoretical approaches have attempted to quantify the physical organization (compaction and geometry) of the bacterial chromosome with its complement of proteins (the nucleoid). The genomic DNA exists in a complex…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are weaving their way into the fabric of society, where they are playing a crucial role in numerous facets of our lives. As we witness the increased deployment of AI and ML in various…
When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…
As people become more concerned with the need to conserve their power consumption we need to find ways to inform them of how electricity is being consumed within the home. There are a number of devices that have been designed using…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
Biological phenomena differ significantly from physical phenomena. At the heart of this distinction is the fact that biological entities have computational abilities and thus they are inherently difficult to predict. This is the reason why…
Bioinformatics research is characterized by voluminous and incremental datasets and complex data analytics methods. The machine learning methods used in bioinformatics are iterative and parallel. These methods can be scaled to handle big…
Biological functions stem from coordinated interactions among proteins, nucleic acids and small molecules. Mass spectrometry technologies for reliable, high throughput single-cell proteomics will add a new modality to genomics and enable…
The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
The mathematical models used to capture features of complex, biological systems are typically non-linear, meaning that there are no generally valid simple relationships between their outputs and the data that might be used to validate them.…
Many biological processes can be thought of as the result of an underlying dynamics in which the system repeatedly undergoes distinct and abortive trajectories with the dynamical process only ending when some specific process, purpose,…
In the past few decades, the life sciences have experienced an unprecedented accumulation of data, ranging from genomic sequences and proteomic profiles to heavy-content imaging, clinical assays, and commercial biological products for…
The rapidly increasing interest in the quantum properties of living matter stimulates a discussion of the fundamental properties of life as well as quantum mechanics. In this discussion often concepts are used that originate in philosophy…