Related papers: Entropy, Ergodicity and Stem Cell Multipotency
In this review, we discuss recent advances on the plasticity of cancer stem cells and highlight their relevance to understand the metastatic process and to guide therapeutic interventions. Recent results suggest that the strict hierarchical…
Phenotypic heterogeneity along the epithelial-mesenchymal (E-M) axis contributes to cancer metastasis and drug resistance. Recent experimental efforts have collated detailed time-course data on the emergence and dynamics of E-M…
Heterogeneity in gene expression across isogenic cell populations can give rise to phenotypic diversity, even when cells are in homogenous environments. This diversity arises from the discrete, stochastic nature of biochemical reactions,…
Maximum-entropy distributions are shown to appear in the probability calculus as approximations of a model by exchangeability or a model by sufficiency, the former model being preferable. The implications of this fact are discussed,…
Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT), and the corresponding reverse process, Mesenchymal-Epithelial Transition (MET), are dynamic and reversible cellular programs orchestrated by many changes at biochemical and morphological levels. A…
Multitype branching processes (MTBP) model branching structures, where the nodes of the resulting tree are objects of different types. One field of application of such models in biology is in studies of cell proliferation. A sampling scheme…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
All living cells interact dynamically with a constantly changing world. Eukaryotes in particular, evolved radically new ways to sense and react to their environment. These advances enabled new and more complex forms of cellular behavior in…
In many adult tissues, stem cells and differentiated cells are not homogeneously distributed : stem cells are arranged in periodic "niches", and differentiated cells are constantly produced and migrate out of these niches. In this article,…
For various species of biological cells, experimental observations indicate the existence of universal distributions of the cellular size, scaling relations between the cell-size moments and simple rules for the cell-size control. We…
Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…
Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
One of the few accepted dynamical foundations of non-additive "non-extensive") statistical mechanics is that the choice of the appropriate entropy functional describing a system with many degrees of freedom should reflect the rate of growth…
The dynamics of gene regulatory networks are often modeled with the assumption of cellular homogeneity. However, this assumption contradicts the plethora of experimental results in a variety of systems, which designates that cell…
A novel mechanism for sympatric speciation that takes into account complex bio-processes within each individual organism is proposed. According to dynamical systems theory, organisms with identical genotypes can possess differentiated…
We introduce a model for describing the dynamics of large numbers of interacting cells. The fundamental dynamical variables in the model are sub-cellular elements, which interact with each other through phenomenological intra- and…
Selective control in a population is the ability to control a member of the population while leaving the other members relatively unaffected. The concept of selective control is developed using cell death or apoptosis in heterogeneous cell…
The spatiotemporal coordination and regulation of cell proliferation is fundamental in many aspects of development and tissue maintenance. Cells have the ability to adapt their division rates in response to mechanical constraints, yet we do…