Related papers: The oral tolerance as a complex network phenomenon
The network approach became a widely used tool to understand the behaviour of complex systems in the last decade. We start from a short description of structural rigidity theory. A detailed account on the combinatorial rigidity analysis of…
Biological networks of interacting agents exhibit similar topological properties for a wide range of scales, from cellular to ecological levels, suggesting the existence of a common evolutionary origin. A general evolutionary mechanism…
Recent studies in mammalian hearts show that left ventricular wall thickening is an important mechanism for systolic ejection and that during contraction the cardiac muscle develops significant stresses in the muscular cross-fiber…
The principles underlying protein folding remains one of Nature's puzzles with important practical consequences for Life. An approach that has gathered momentum since the late 1990's, looks at protein hetero-polymers and their folding…
Fibrous networks such as collagen are common in biological systems. Recent theoretical and experimental efforts have shed light on the mechanics of single component networks. Most real biopolymer networks, however, are composites made of…
The cellular phenotype is described by a complex network of molecular interactions. Elucidating network properties that distinguish disease from the healthy cellular state is therefore of critical importance for gaining systems-level…
Complex networks are used to depict topological features of complex systems. The structure of a network characterizes the interactions among elements of the system, and facilitates the study of many dynamical processes taking place on it.…
The mechanisms by which organs acquire their functional structure and realize its maintenance (or homeostasis) over time are still largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate this question on adipose tissue. Adipose tissue can represent…
Given a metabolic network in terms of its metabolites and reactions, our goal is to efficiently compute the minimal knock out sets of reactions required to block a given behaviour. We describe an algorithm which improves the computation of…
The physical interpretation of the functioning of the adaptive immune system, which has been thoroughly characterized on genetic and molecular levels, provides a unique opportunity to define an adaptive self-organizing biological system in…
In this article a generalized mathematical model describing the interactions between malignant tumour and immune system with discrete time delay incorporated into the system is considered. Time delay represents the time required to generate…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
A statistical mechanical distance constraint model (DCM) is presented that explicitly accounts for network rigidity among constraints present within a system. Constraints are characterized by local microscopic free energy functions.…
A simple model of language evolution, proposed in \cite{K_N}, is characterized by a pay-off in communicative function, and by an error in learning, that measures the accuracy in language acquisition. In the mean field approximation, this…
This paper presents a novel framework for the modeling of biological networks. It makes use of recent tools analyzing the robust satisfaction of properties of (hybrid) dynamical systems. The main challenge of this approach as applied to…
The concept of network immunity, i.e., the robustness of the network connectivity after a random deletion of edges or vertices, has been investigated in biological or communication networks. We apply this concept to a self-assembling,…
In this paper we present a network model to study the impact of spatial distribution of constituents, coupling between them and diffusive processes in the context of biological situations. The model is in terms of network of mobile elements…
The construction of a network of cell-to-cell contacts makes it possible to characterize the patterns and spatial organisation of tissues. Such networks are highly dynamic, depending on the changes of the tissue architecture caused by cell…
The human organism is an integrated network where complex physiologic systems, each with its own regulatory mechanisms, continuously interact, and where failure of one system can trigger a breakdown of the entire network. Identifying and…
Adaptive networks have been recently introduced in the context of disease propagation on complex networks. They account for the mutual interaction between the network topology and the states of the nodes. Until now, existing models have…