Related papers: An explanatory evo-devo model for the developmenta…
Morphogenesis is the biological process that causes the emergence and changes of patterns (tissues and organs) in living organisms. It is a robust, self-organising mechanism, governed by Genetic Regulatory Networks (GRN), that hasn't been…
The evolutionary origins of ageing and age-associated diseases continue to pose a fundamental question in biology. This study is concerned with a recently proposed framework, which conceptualises development and ageing as a continuous…
Many biological processes have been the source of inspiration for heuristic methods that generate high-quality solutions to solve optimization and search problems. This thesis presents an epigenetic technique for Evolutionary Algorithms,…
We introduce and study a general framework for modeling the evolution of crack networks. The evolution steps are triggered by exponential clocks corresponding to local micro-events, and thus reflect the state of the pattern. In an…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…
"Epigenetic Tracking" is an evo-devo method to generate arbitrary 2d or 3d shapes; as such, it belongs to the field of "artificial embryology". In silico experiments have proved the effectiveness of the method in devo-evolving shapes of any…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
It is well known that many complex systems, both in technology and nature, exhibit hierarchical modularity: smaller modules, each of them providing a certain function, are used within larger modules that perform more complex functions. What…
A biologically motivated individual-based framework for evolution in network-structured populations is developed that can accommodate eco-evolutionary dynamics. This framework is used to construct a network birth and death model. The…
Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…
Cell fate decisions in multicellular organisms are precisely coordinated, leading to highly reproducible macroscopic outcomes of developmental processes. The origins of this reproducibility can be found at the molecular level during the…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
This paper deals with a model of cellular growth called "Epigenetic Tracking", whose key features are: i) distinction bewteen "normal" and "driver" cells; ii) presence in driver cells of an epigenetic memory, that holds the position of the…
In early development, regulation of transcription results in precisely positioned and highly reproducible expression patterns that specify cellular identities. How transcription, a fundamentally noisy molecular process, is regulated to…
The time taken for gene expression varies not least because proteins vary in length considerably. This paper uses an abstract, tuneable Boolean regulatory network model to explore gene expression time variation. In particular, it is shown…
This study presents the approach to analyzing the evolution of an arbitrary complex system whose behavior is characterized by a set of different time-dependent factors. The key requirement for these factors is only that they must contain an…
Phylostratigraphy suggests that new genes are continually born de novo from non-genic sequences, and the genes that persist found new lineages, contributing to the adaptive evolution of organisms. While recent evidence supports the view…
The dynamics of cellular pattern formation is crucial for understanding embryonic development and tissue morphogenesis. Recent studies have shown that human dermal fibroblasts cultured on liquid crystal elastomers can exhibit an increase in…
Biological genotypes do not code directly for phenotypes; developmental physiology is the control layer that separates genomes from capacities ascertained by selection. A key aspect is competency, as cells are not a passive material but…