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The question of what determines genetic diversity both between and within species has long remained unsolved by the modern evolutionary theory (MET). However, it has not deterred researchers from producing interpretations of genetic…
Recent studies have established an apparent relationship between the repertoire of signals used for communication and neocortex size of different species of primates and the topology of the social network formed by the interactions between…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
The quintessential property of neuronal systems is their intensive patterns of selective synaptic connections. The current work describes a physics-based approach to neuronal shape modeling and synthesis and its consideration for the…
Living at high-altitude is one of the most difficult challenges that humans had to cope with during their evolution. Whereas several genomic studies have revealed some of the genetic bases of adaptations in Tibetan, Andean and Ethiopian…
The aim of this study was to estimate the number of new cells and neurons added to the dentate gyrus across the lifespan, and to compare the rate of age-associated decline in neurogenesis across species. Data from mice (Mus musculus), rats…
The exploration of vast genotype spaces poses fundamental challenges for evolving populations. As the number of genotypes encoding viable phenotypes grows exponentially with genome length, populations can only explore a tiny fraction of…
The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we propose a new computational method to investigate the particularities of evolution. Second, we apply this method to a model of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and explore the evolution of…
We investigate Eigen's model for the evolution of the genetic code of microorganisms using a novel method based on population dynamics analysis. This model, for a given number of offspring, determines long-term survival as a function of the…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
The theory of evolution states that the diversity of species can be explained by descent with modification. Therefore, all living beings are related through a common ancestor. This evolutionary process must have left traces in our molecular…
The genetic diversity of a species is shaped by its recent evolutionary history and can be used to infer demographic events or selective sweeps. Most inference methods are based on the null hypothesis that natural selection is a weak or…
Development combines three basic processes asymmetric --- cell division, signaling and gene regulation --- in a multitude of ways to create an overwhelming diversity of multicellular life-forms. Here, we attempt to chart this diversity…
The hierarchical organisation of cell identity is a fundamental feature of animal development with rich and well-characterized experimental phenomenology, yet the mechanisms driving its emergence remain unknown. The regulation of cell…
Segmentation in arthropod embryogenesis represents a well-known example of body plan diversity. Striped patterns of gene expression that lead to the future body segments appear simultaneously or sequentially in long and short germ-band…
In this article, we investigate the ergodic behaviour of a multidimensional age-dependent branching process with a singular jump kernel, motivated by studying the phenomenon of telomere shortening in cell populations. Our model tracks…
Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom, but also on the cellular level. In cancer for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
Neuronal morphology is an essential element for brain activity and function. We take advantage of current availability of brain-wide neuron digital reconstructions of the Pyramidal cells from a mouse brain, and analyze several emergent…