Related papers: Entropy, Ergodicity and Stem Cell Multipotency

Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have promising clinical applications in regenerative medicine, drug-discovery and personalised medicine due to their potential to differentiate into all cell types, a property know as pluripotency. A…

Biological membranes and vesicles play a central role in living systems, forming dynamic interfaces that regulate cellular organization and function. Classical descriptions of membrane mechanics that are rooted in equilibrium statistical…

Cell proliferation and cell movement are fundamentally stochastic processes which lead to variability in the growth and spatial structure of cell populations in many biological settings, such as cell invasion, wound healing, and tumour…

Organisms maintain the status quo, holding key physiological variables constant to within an acceptable tolerance, and yet adapt with precision and plasticity to dynamic changes in externalities. What organizational principles ensure such…

The principle of maximum entropy provides a useful method for inferring statistical mechanics models from observations in correlated systems, and is widely used in a variety of fields where accurate data are available. While the assumptions…

Robustness and sensitivity of responses generated by cell signaling networks has been associated with survival and evolvability of organisms. However, existing methods analyzing robustness and sensitivity of signaling networks ignore the…

We explore the bifurcations and dynamics of a scalar differential equation with a single constant delay which models the population of human hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. One parameter continuation reveals that with a delay…

Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…

The past few decades have seen great leaps in technologies to analyze cells and tissues. Omics methods in particular now allow us unprecedented access to their the molecular composition where the base-level resolution of transcripts and…

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…

Living organisms rely on endogenous feedback mechanisms to maintain homeostasis in the presence of uncertainty and environmental fluctuations. An emerging challenge at the interface of control systems engineering and synthetic biology is…

The application of single-cell molecular profiling coupled with spatial technologies has enabled charting cellular heterogeneity in reference tissues and in disease. This new wave of molecular data has highlighted the expected diversity of…

Mathematical modeling of disease outbreaks can infer the future trajectory of an epidemic, which can inform policy decisions. Another task is inferring the origin of a disease, which is relatively difficult with current mathematical models.…

Markovian population models are suitable abstractions to describe well-mixed interacting particle systems in situation where stochastic fluctuations are significant due to the involvement of low copy particles. In molecular biology,…

Organisms have evolved a variety of mechanisms to cope with the unpredictability of environmental conditions, and yet mainstream models of metabolic regulation are typically based on strict optimality principles that do not account for…

We study the surface fluctuations of a tissue with a dynamics dictated by cell-rearrangement, cell-division, and cell-death processes. Surface fluctuations are calculated in the homeostatic state, where cell division and cell death…

A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…

Using results from neurobiology on perceptual decision making and value-based decision making, the problem of decision making between lotteries is reformulated in an abstract space where uncertain prospects are mapped to corresponding…

The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…

The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem. We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally…