Related papers: Precision and reproducibility of macroscopic devel…
A computational theory and model of the ontogeny and development of bilateral symmetry in multicellular organisms is presented. Understanding the origin and evolution of bilateral organisms requires an understanding of how bilateral…
Mathematical models play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of biological experiments. Studies often present a model that generates the observations, connecting hypothesized process to an observed pattern. Such generative…
Stem cells, through their ability to produce daughter stem cells and differentiate into specialized cells, are essential in the growth, maintenance, and repair of biological tissues. Understanding the dynamics of cell populations in the…
Biological cells replicate their genomes in a well-planned manner. The DNA replication program of an organism determines the timing at which different genomic regions are replicated, with fundamental consequences for cell homeostasis and…
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…
It is challenging to apply the tenets of individuality to filamentous fungi: a fungal mycelium can contain millions of genetically diverse but totipotent nuclei, each capable of founding new mycelia. Moreover a single mycelium can…
The emergence of complex patterns of organization close to the Cambrian boundary is known to have happened over a (geologically) short period of time. It involved the rapid diversification of body plans and stands as one of the major…
Biological systems excel at building spatial structures on scales ranging from nanometers to kilometers and exhibit temporal patterning from milliseconds to years. One approach that nature has taken to accomplish this relies on the…
The complexity of gene regulatory networks in multicellular organisms makes interpretable low-dimensional models highly desirable. An attractive geometric picture, attributed to Waddington, visualizes the differentiation of a cell into…
Cellular life requires the presence of a set of biochemical mechanisms in order to maintain a predictable process of growth and division. Several attempts have been made towards the building of minimal protocells from a top-down approach,…
The size of a narrow gap traversable by a fixed-wing drone is limited by its wingspan. Inspired by birds, here, we enable the traversal of a gap of sub-wingspan width and height using a morphing-wing drone capable of temporarily sweeping in…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
Tandem duplications are an essential source of genetic novelty, and their variation in natural populations is expected to influence adaptive walks. Here, we describe evolutionary impacts of recently-derived, segregating tandem duplications…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
Single-cell experiments have revealed cell-to-cell variability in generation times and growth rates for genetically identical cells. Theoretical models relating the fluctuating generation times of single cells to the population growth rate…
How does growth encode form in developing organisms? Many different spatiotemporal growth profiles may sculpt tissues into the same target 3D shapes, but only specific growth patterns are observed in animal and plant development. In…
This paper reports on patterns exhibiting self-replication with spontaneous, inheritable mutations and exponential genetic drift in Neural Cellular Automata. Despite the models not being explicitly trained for mutation or inheritability,…
We consider discrete-time random perturbations of monotone cellular automata (CA) in two dimensions. Under general conditions, we prove the existence of half-space velocities, and then establish the validity of the Wulff construction for…
Deterministic many-body systems governed by simple interactions can self-organize into macroscopic patterns, and the determinants of long-time behavior are assumed to be encoded in the initial configuration. Here we show that predictability…