Related papers: Inverse Relationship Between Molecular Diversity A…
When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…
As automatic optimization techniques find their way into industrial applications, the behavior of many complex systems is determined by some form of planner picking the right actions to optimize a given objective function. In many cases,…
A simple model of species origin resulted from dynamic features of a population, solely, is developed. The model is based on the evolution optimality in space distribution, and the selection is gone over the mobility. Some biological issues…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
Many of the chemical reactions that take place within a living cell are irreversible. Due to evolutionary pressures, the number of allowable reactions within these systems are highly constrained and thus the resulting metabolic networks…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
In sexual populations, selection operates neither on the whole genome, which is repeatedly taken apart and reassembled by recombination, nor on individual alleles that are tightly linked to the chromosomal neighborhood. The resulting…
Cycling tissues such as the intestinal epithelium, germ line, and hair follicles, require a constant flux of differentiated cells. These tissues are maintained by a population of stem cells, which generate differentiated progenies and…
When group members claim a portion of limited resources, it is tempting to invest more effort to get a larger share. However, if everyone acts similarly, they all get the same piece they would obtain without extra effort. This is the…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
We present a detailed kinetic model for the Polymerase Chain Reaction, and model the probability of replication in terms of the physical parameters of the problem. Applying the theory of branching processes, we show the existance of a new…
The antibody repertoire of each individual is continuously updated by the evolutionary process of B cell receptor mutation and selection. It has recently become possible to gain detailed information concerning this process through…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
Exploiting the mathematical curiosity of intransitive dice, we present a simple theoretical model for co-evolution that captures scales ranging from the genome of the individual to the system-wide emergence of species diversity. We study a…
We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Autocatalytic processes underlie diverse systems in which replication is triggered at interfaces, including heterogeneous catalysis on solid substrates, enzyme activity at membranes, viral infections, biofilm growth, and spatially…
We study the mathematical properties of a general model of cell division structured with several internal variables. We begin with a simpler and specific model with two variables, we solve the eigenvalue problem with strong or weak…
Biological systems, unlike physical or chemical systems, are characterized by the very inhomogeneous distribution of their components. The immune system, in particular, is notable for self-organizing its structure. Classically, the dynamics…