Related papers: Morphogenesis at criticality?
We study the evolution of critical fluctuations in an expanding system within a hadronic transport approach. The initialization of the system with critical fluctuations is achieved by coupling the ideal hadron resonance gas cumulants to the…
Large-scale recordings of neuronal activity make it possible to gain insights into the collective activity of neural ensembles. It has been hypothesized that neural populations might be optimized to operate at a 'thermodynamic critical…
Transcription factors (TFs) are key regulators of gene expression. Based on the classical scenario in which the TF search process switches between one-dimensional motion along the DNA molecule and free Brownian motion in the nucleus, we…
Many cellular responses to surrounding cues require temporally concerted transcriptional regulation of multiple genes. In prokaryotic cells, a single-input-module motif with one transcription factor regulating multiple target genes can…
Based on a recently proposed non-equilibrium mechanism for spatial pattern formation [cond-mat/0312366] we study how morphogenesis can be controlled by locally coupled discrete dynamical networks, similar to gene regulation networks of…
Successful biological development via spatial regulation of cell differentiation relies on action of multiple signaling molecules that are known as morphogens. It is now well established that signaling molecules create non-uniform…
A model for the generation of fractal growth networks in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension is presented. These networks are considered as the spatial support of reaction-diffusion and pattern formation processes. The local dynamics at…
The metazoan body plan is established during early embryogenesis via collective cell rearrangements and evolutionarily conserved gene networks, as part of a process commonly referred to as gastrulation. While substantial progress has been…
In multicellular organisms, patterns of gene expression are established in response to gradients of signaling molecules. During fly development in early Drosophila embryos, the Bicoid (Bcd) morphogen gradient is established within the first…
Morphogenesis in animal development involves significant morphological transitions leading to the emerging body plan of a mature animal. Understanding how the collective physical processes drive robust morphological patterning requires a…
Atmospheric flows exhibit fluctuations of all scales (space -time) ranging from turbulence (millimeters-seconds) to climate (thousands of kilometers-years). The apparently random fluctuations however exhibit long-range spatio-temporal…
The development of prebiotic homochirality on early-Earth or another planetary platform may be viewed as a critical phenomenon. It is shown, in the context of spatio-temporal polymerization reaction networks, that environmental effects --…
The concept of positional information is central to our understanding of how cells in a multicellular structure determine their developmental fates. Nevertheless, positional information has neither been defined mathematically nor quantified…
We investigate the limit behavior of supercritical multitype branching processes in random environments with linear fractional offspring distributions and show that there exists a phase transition in the behavior of local probabilites of…
Information theory is gaining popularity as a tool to characterize performance of biological systems. However, information is commonly quantified without reference to whether or how a system could extract and use it; as a result,…
Growth-fragmentation processes describe the evolution of systems of cells which grow continuously and fragment suddenly; they are used in models of cell division and protein polymerisation. Typically, we may expect that in the long run, the…
We study the emergence of critical dynamics in the steady shear rheology of fluidized soft glassy materials. Within a mesoscale elasto-plastic model accounting for a shear band instability, we show how an additional noise can induce a…
This contribution presents a review of our present theoretical as well as experimental knowledge of different fluctuation observables relevant to nuclear multifragmentation. The possible connection between the presence of a fluctuation peak…
Based on a non-equilibrium mechanism for spatial pattern formation we study how position information can be controlled by locally coupled discrete dynamical networks, similar to gene regulation networks of cells in a developing…
Multicellular organisms exhibit a high degree of structural organization with specific cell types always occurring in characteristic locations. The conventional framework for describing the emergence of such consistent spatial patterns is…