Related papers: Epigenetics: What it is about?
Characterization of pluripotent states, in which cells can both self-renew and differentiate, and the irreversible loss of pluripotency are important research areas in developmental biology. In particular, an understanding of these…
The rich and varied ways that genetic material can be passed between species has motivated extensive research into the theory of phylogenetic networks. Features that align with biological processes, or with desirable mathematical…
Cells can often choose among several stably heritable phenotypes. Examples are the expression of genes in eukaryotic cells where long chromosomal regions can adopt persistent and heritable silenced or active states, that may be associated…
Understanding the spatial organisation of the genome in the cell nucleus is one of the current grand challenges in biophysics. Certain biochemical -- or epigenetic -- marks that are deposited along the genome are thought to play an…
"Epigenetic Tracking" is a model of systems of biological cells, able to generate arbitrary 2 or 3-dimensional cellular shapes of any kind and complexity (in terms of number of cells, number of colours, etc.) starting from a single cell. If…
Adaptation mechanism of cells on the basis of stochastic gene expression and epigenetic modification is proposed. From marginally stable states generated by epigenetic modification, a gene expression pattern that achieves greater cell…
Understanding the dynamics of genome rearrangements is a major issue of phylogenetics. Phylogenetics is the study of species evolution. A major goal of the field is to establish evolutionary relationships within groups of species, in order…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
Evolutionary Computation is a group of biologically inspired algorithms used to solve complex optimisation problems. It can be split into Evolutionary Algorithms, which take inspiration from genetic inheritance, and Swarm Intelligence…
Gradual transformation of the epidermal stem cells to corneocytes involves a chain of chronologically well-arranged events that mostly stimulated locally by their neighbors. Cell diversity that observed during the differentiation through…
Maintaining tissue homeostasis requires appropriate regulation of stem cell differentiation. The Waddington landscape posits that gene circuits in a cell form a potential landscape of different cell types, wherein cells follow attractors of…
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…
The origin of species has been the mystery of mysteries in natural science. By analogy, the origin of synthetic information, we suggest, is the mystery of mysteries in information science. The question carries a moral weight that a…
How do mammalian cells that share the same genome exist in notably distinct phenotypes, exhibiting differences in morphology, gene expression patterns, and epigenetic chromatin statuses? Furthermore how do cells of different phenotypes…
Genetic algorithms are a well-known example of bio-inspired heuristic methods. They mimic natural selection by modeling several operators such as mutation, crossover, and selection. Recent discoveries about Epigenetics regulation processes…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
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…
Living organisms are the most complex, interesting and significant objects regarding all substructures of the universe. Life science is regarded as a science of the 21st century and one can expect great new discoveries in the near futures.…
As the first step in an investigation of the origin of genetic information, we study how some species of molecules are preserved over cell generations and play an important role in controlling the growth of a cell. We consider a model…
Embryology has long played a foundational role in shaping our scientific understanding of animal evolution. In recent decades, growing evidence has also highlighted its role in cancer. Despite the indisputable similarities between embryonic…