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The evidence that Flowering Locus T (FT) protein and its paralog Twin Sister of FT, act as the long distance floral stimulus, or at least that they are part of it in diverse plant species, has attracted much attention in recent years.…
Morphogenesis is the biological process that causes the emergence and changes of patterns (tissues and organs) in living organisms. It is a robust, self-organising mechanism, governed by Genetic Regulatory Networks (GRN), that hasn't been…
The fundamental biological processes of development of tissues and organs in multicellular organisms is governed by various signaling molecules, which are called morphogens. It is known that spatial and temporal variations in concentration…
Morphogenetic patterns are highly sophisticated dissipative structures. Are they governed by the same general mechanisms as chemical and hydrodynamic patterns? Turing's symmetry breaking and Wolpert's signalling provide alternative…
We present families of combinatorial classes described as trees with nodes that can carry one of two types of "flowers": integer partitions or integer compositions. Two parameters on the flowers of trees will be considered: the number of…
Epigenetics has captured the attention of scientists in the past decades, yet its scope has been continuously changing. In this paper, we give an overview on how and why its definition has evolved and suggest several clarification on the…
The origin and early evolution of eukaryotes are one of the major transitions in the evolution of life on earth. One of its most interesting aspects is the emergence of cellular organelles, their dynamics, their functions, and their…
Plants synthesize volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to attract pollinators and beneficial microorganisms, to defend themselves against herbivores and pathogens and for plant-plant communication. Generally, accumulation and emission of VOCs…
A model of the regular arrangement of leaves on a plant stem (phyllotactic patterns) is proposed, based on a new plant pattern algorithm. Tripartite patterning is proposed to occur by the interaction of two signaling pathways. Each pathway…
I consider the many ways in which evolved information-flows are restricted and metabolic resources protected and hidden -- the thesis of living phenomena as evolutionary cryptosystems. I present the information theory of secrecy systems and…
Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One of the main challenges in the field is to take biological data for a group of organisms and to infer an evolutionary tree, a graph that represents these…
Phylogenetic networks are becoming of increasing interest to evolutionary biologists due to their ability to capture complex non-treelike evolutionary processes. From a combinatorial point of view, such networks are certain types of rooted…
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…
It is conjectured that all known fermions are topological solitons. This could explain the non-observation of bosonic leptons and baryons and provide a physical mechanism for the Pauli exclusion principle.
Lumens are cavities enclosed by polarized cells that are essential for organ function, from nutrient transport in the gut to gas exchange in the lungs. Defects in lumen formation are associated with severe diseases, including polycystic…
We investigate the distribution of flavonoids, a major category of plant secondary metabolites, across species. Flavonoids are known to show high species specificity, and were once considered as chemical markers for understanding adaptive…
The grand challenges in biology today are being shaped by powerful high-throughput technologies that have revealed the genomes of many organisms, global expression patterns of genes and detailed information about variation within…
At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge {\it de novo} with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution,…
Many human males produce dysfunctional sperm. Various plants frequently abort pollen. Hybrid matings often produce sterile males. Widespread male sterility is puzzling. Natural selection prunes reproductive failure. Puzzling failure implies…
Modern security, infrastructure, and safety-critical systems increasingly operate in environments characterised by disruption, uncertainty, physical damage, and degraded communications. Conventional digital technologies -- centralised…