Related papers: Functional morphology, stable isotopes, and human …
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…
A central problem of neuroscience involves uncovering the principles governing the organization of nervous systems which ensure robustness in brain development. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans provides us with a model organism for…
We analyze evolutionary dynamics in a confluent, branching cellular population, such as in a growing duct, vasculature, or in a branching microbial colony. We focus on the coarse-grained features of the evolution and build a statistical…
We expand the current understanding of ecological resilience to include the nested hierarchy of cognitive submodules that particularly, if not uniquely, delineates human ecosystems. These modules, ranging from the immune system to the local…
Understanding the emergence and evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation is a core problem in biology. We develop a quantitative model that shows that a multicellular form emerges from genetically identical unicellular…
Animal vision is thought to optimize various objectives from metabolic efficiency to discrimination performance, yet its ultimate objective is to facilitate the survival of the animal within its ecological niche. However, modeling animal…
Phylogenetic trees represent certain species and their likely ancestors. In such a tree, present-day species are leaves and an edge from u to v indicates that u is an ancestor of v. Weights on these edges indicate the phylogenetic distance.…
Exoplanet habitability remains a challenging field due to the large distances separating Earth from other stars. Using insights from biology and astrophysics, we studied the habitability of M-dwarf exoplanets by modeling their surface…
Biological materials exhibit complex structure-property relationships which are only beginning to be elucidated. Understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of the structure-property relationships is the key to designing bioinspired…
The Moran process is a classic stochastic process that models the rise and takeover of novel traits in network-structured populations. In biological terms, a set of mutants, each with fitness $m\in(0,\infty)$ invade a population of…
The sequence of a protein is not only constrained by its physical and biochemical properties under current selection, but also by features of its past evolutionary history. Understanding the extent and the form that these evolutionary…
Machine learning (ML) offers considerable promise for the design of new molecules and materials. In real-world applications, the design problem is often domain-specific, and suffers from insufficient data, particularly labeled data, for ML…
Tip-driven growth processes underlie the development of many plants. To date, tip-driven growth processes have been modelled as an elongating path or series of segments without taking into account lateral expansion during elongation.…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
One of the biggest challenges in biology is to understand how activity at the cellular level of neurons, as a result of their mutual interactions, leads to the observed behavior of an organism responding to a variety of environmental…
Thousands of candidate human-specific regulatory sequences (HSRS) have been identified, supporting the hypothesis that unique to human phenotypes result from human-specific alterations of genomic regulatory networks. Here, conservation…
Machine learning has emerged as a powerful approach in materials discovery. Its major challenge is selecting features that create interpretable representations of materials, useful across multiple prediction tasks. We introduce an…
Mitochondrial and nuclear genomes must be co-adapted to ensure proper cellular respiration and energy production. Mito-nuclear incompatibility reduces individual fitness and induces hybrid infertility, suggesting a possible role in…
Food webs are complex ecological networks whose structure is both ecologically and statistically constrained, with many network properties being correlated with each other. Despite the recognition of these invariable relationships in food…