Related papers: The Control of Branching Morphogenesis
At the heart of many contemporary theories of life is the concept of biological self-organisation: organisms have to continuously produce and maintain the conditions of their own existence in order to stay alive. The way in which these…
From the Golgi apparatus to endosomes, organelles in the endomembrane system exhibit complex and varied morphologies that are often related to their function. Such membrane-bound organelles operate far from equilibrium due to directed…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Morphogenesis involves complex shape changes of biological tissues. Yet, tissue shape changes depend on tissue rheology, which in turn arises from the interplay of large numbers of cells. Here, we link cell- and tissue-scale mechanics by…
Branching architecture characterizes numerous systems, ranging from synthetic (hyper)branched polymers and biomolecules such as lignin, amylopectin, and nucleic acids to tracheal and neuronal networks. Its ubiquity reflects the many…
A study of correlations in tractable multiparticle cascade models in terms of wavelets reveals many promising features. The selfsimilar construction of the wavelet basis functions and their multiscale localization properties provide a new…
We consider a discrete-time host-parasite model for a population of cells which are colonized by proliferating parasites. The cell population grows like an ordinary Galton-Watson process, but in reflection of real biological settings the…
It has been reported that the number of transcription factors encoded in prokaryotic genomes scales approximately quadratically with their total number of genes. We propose a conceptual explanation of this finding and illustrate it using a…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes…
Developing and maintaining life requires a lot of computation. This is done by gene regulatory networks. But we have little understanding of how this computation is organized. I show that there is a direct correspondence between the…
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of materials and information between cells and their organelles. Further, lipid composition and morphology can play a key role in regulating a variety of biological processes. For example, viral uptake,…
It is well known that the behaviour of a branching process is completely described by the generating function of the offspring law and its fixed points. Branching random walks are a natural generalization of branching processes: a branching…
Transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation shape tissue-type-specific proteomes, but their relative contributions remain contested. Estimates of the factors determining protein levels in human tissues do not distinguish between (i)…
The functioning of a living cell is largely determined by the structure of its regulatory network, comprising non-linear interactions between regulatory genes. An important factor for the stability and evolvability of such regulatory…
Tissue homeostasis, the biological process of maintaining a steady state in tissue via control of cell proliferation, death, and metabolic function, is essential for the development, growth, maintenance, and proper function of living…
Mechanics and biochemical signaling are both often deregulated in cancer, leading to cancer cell phenotypes that exhibit increased invasiveness, proliferation, and survival. The dynamics and interactions of cytoskeletal components control…
The brain is a complex organ characterized by heterogeneous patterns of structural connections supporting unparalleled feats of cognition and a wide range of behaviors. New noninvasive imaging techniques now allow these patterns to be…
Microelectronic morphogenesis is the creation and maintenance of complex functional structures by microelectronic information within shape-changing materials. Only recently has in-built information technology begun to be used to reshape…
The focus of this article is studying an optimal control problem for branching diffusion processes. Initially, we introduce the problem in its strong formulation and expand it to include linearly growing drifts. Then, we present a relaxed…