Related papers: Emergence of Function
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
Disease awareness in infection dynamics can be modeled with adaptive contact networks whose rewiring rules reflect the attempt by susceptibles to avoid infectious contacts. Simulations of this type of models show an active phase with…
The effect of mechanical interactions between cells in the spreading of bacterial populations was investigated in one-dimensional space. A continuum-mechanics approach, comprising cell migration, proliferation, and exclusion processes, was…
We discuss the mathematical modelling of two of the main mechanisms which pushed forward the emergence of multicellularity: phenotype divergence in cell differentiation, and between-cell cooperation. In line with the atavistic theory of…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solid-like to a fluid-like state or vice versa. Here, we introduce a new way for…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
Recent work on particle-based models of tissues has suggested that any finite rate of cell division and cell death is sufficient to fluidize an epithelial tissue. At the same time, experimental evidence has indicated the existence of glassy…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…
Biomaterial systems have allowed for the in vitro production of complex, emergent tissue behaviors that were not possible with conventional 2D culture systems allowing for analysis of the normal development as well as disease processes. We…
We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level…
This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…
Over the past two decades, complex network theory provided the ideal framework for investigating the intimate relationships between the topological properties characterizing the wiring of connections among a system's unitary components and…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
The emergence of collective behaviors in networks of dynamical units in pairwise interaction has been explained as the effect of diffusive coupling. How does the presence of higher-order interaction impact the onset of spontaneous or…
The dynamical systems found in Nature are rarely isolated. Instead they interact and influence each other. The coupling functions that connect them contain detailed information about the functional mechanisms underlying the interactions and…
A classical problem describing the collective motion of cells, is the movement driven by consumption/depletion of a nutrient. Here we analyze one of the simplest such model written as a coupled Partial Differential Equation/Ordinary…
Ever since the ground breaking work of Trepat et al. in 2009, we know that cell colonies growing on a substrate can be under tensile mechanical stress. The origin of tension has so far been attributed to cellular motility forces being…