Related papers: Epigenetics: What it is about?
A historical dispute in the conceptual underpinnings of evolution is the validity of the gene centered view of evolution. \cite{dawkins,lewontin} We transcend this debate by formalizing the gene centered view as a dynamic version of the…
Epigenetics is the study of how people's behavior and environments influence the way their genes are expressed, even though their DNA sequence is itself unchanged. By aggregating age-related epigenetic markers, epigenetic 'clocks' have…
Phylogenetic analyses of gene expression have great potential for addressing a wide range of questions. These analyses will, for example, identify genes that have evolutionary shifts in expression that are correlated with evolutionary…
Astrobiology is usually defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. As such it is inherently interdisciplinary and cannot help but engender a worldview infused by cosmic and evolutionary…
A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, 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…
The process of morphogenesis, which can be defined as an evolution of the form of an organism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries in the life sciences. It is clear, that gene expression patterns cannot explain the development of the…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
Genetic algorithms are considered as one of the most efficient search techniques. Although they do not offer an optimal solution, their ability to reach a suitable solution in considerably short time gives them their respectable role in…
Applying the concepts and formalisms from Evolutionary Game Theory to the data regime, the fundamental paradigms of Evolutionary Data Theory are introduced. Interpreting data in matrix form as evolutionary entities, input data is mapped to…
We live within an increasingly technological, information-laden environment for the first time in human evolution.This subjects us, and will continue to subject us in an accelerating fashion, to an unremitting exposure to meaningful…
Phylogenetic placement refers to a family of tools and methods to analyze, visualize, and interpret the tsunami of metagenomic sequencing data generated by high-throughput sequencing. Compared to alternative (e. g., similarity-based)…
The field of ageing science has gone through remarkable progress in recent decades, yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered or unexplored. Here we present a curated list of 100 open problems in ageing and longevity science. These…
The twenty-first century has ushered in the age of big data and data economy, in which data DNA, which carries important knowledge, insights and potential, has become an intrinsic constituent of all data-based organisms. An appropriate…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
This paper introduces several fundamental concepts in information theory from the perspective of their origins in engineering. Understanding such concepts is important in neuroscience for two reasons. Simply applying formulae from…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Orthology is a central concept in evolutionary and comparative genomics, used to relate corresponding genes in different species. In particular, orthologs are needed to infer species trees. In this chapter, we introduce the fundamental…
In this article we focus on evolving information systems. First a delimitation of the concept of evolution is provided, resulting in a first attempt to a general theory for such evolutions. The theory makes a distinction between the…