Related papers: Tiling solutions for optimal biological sensing
The innate immune system, acting as the first line of host defense, senses and adapts to foreign challenges through complex intracellular and intercellular signaling networks. Endotoxin tolerance and priming elicited by macrophages are…
This paper gives an overview of the use of control systems engineering in synthetic biology, motivated by applications such as cell therapy and cell fate reprogramming for regenerative medicine. A ubiquitous problem in these and other…
Interactions between neighboring cells are essential for generating or refining patterns in a number of biological systems. We propose a discrete filtering approach to predict how networks of cells modulate spatially varying input signals…
Microbiological systems evolve to fulfill their tasks with maximal efficiency. The immune system is a remarkable example, where self-non self distinction is accomplished by means of molecular interaction between self proteins and antigens,…
Autonomous neural systems must efficiently process information in a wide range of novel environments, which may have very different statistical properties. We consider the problem of how to optimally distribute receptors along a…
We explore the commonalities between methods for assuring the security of computer systems (cybersecurity) and the mechanisms that have evolved through natural selection to protect vertebrates against pathogens, and how insights derived…
Biological and living organisms sense and process information from their surroundings, typically having access only to a subset of external observables for a limited amount of time. In this work, we uncover how biological systems can…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
The adaptive immune system of vertebrates can detect, respond to, and memorize diverse pathogens from past experience. While the clonal selection of T helper (Th) cells is the simple and established mechanism to better recognize new…
Adaptive networks appear in many biological applications. They combine topological evolution of the network with dynamics in the network nodes. Recently, the dynamics of adaptive networks has been investigated in a number of parallel…
The proper functioning of multicellular organisms requires the robust establishment of precise proportions between distinct cell-types. This developmental differentiation process typically involves intracellular regulatory and stochastic…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
An object-oriented combinator chemistry was used to construct an artificial organism with a system architecture possessing characteristics necessary for organisms to evolve into more complex forms. This architecture supports modularity by…
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…
Niching enables a genetic algorithm (GA) to maintain diversity in a population. It is particularly useful when the problem has multiple optima where the aim is to find all or as many as possible of these optima. When the fitness landscape…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Living cells must control the reading out or "expression" of information encoded in their genomes, and this regulation often is mediated by transcription factors--proteins that bind to DNA and either enhance or repress the expression of…
Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…
Living organisms are not just random collections of organic molecules. There is continuous information processing going on in the apparent bouncing around of molecules of life. Optimisation criteria in this information processing can be…