Related papers: Phenotypic heterogeneity in modeling cancer evolut…
We study time continuous branching processes with exponentially distributed lifetimes, with two types of cells that proliferate according to binary fission. A range of possible system dynamics are considered, each of which is characterized…
Recent evidence suggests that nongenetic (epigenetic) mechanisms play an important role at all stages of cancer evolution. In many cancers, these mechanisms have been observed to induce dynamic switching between two or more cell states,…
Populations can evolve in order to adapt to external changes. The capacity to evolve and adapt makes successful treatment of infectious diseases and cancer difficult. Indeed, therapy resistance has quickly become a key challenge for global…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
The emergence of a predominant phenotype within a cell population is often triggered by a rare accumulation of DNA mutations in a single cell. For example, tumors may be initiated by a single cell in which multiple mutations cooperate to…
Phenotypic heterogeneity in cancer cells is widely observed and is often linked to drug resistance. In several cases, such heterogeneity in drug sensitivity of tumors is driven by stochastic and reversible acquisition of a drug tolerant…
When confronted with an undesired cell population, such as bacterial infections or tumors, we seek the most effective treatment, designed to eliminate the population as rapidly as possible. A common practice is to monitor the cells…
Spatial environmental variation can either amplify or suppress the fixation of beneficial mutants in structured populations, yet the interplay of ecological factors and spatial structure in determining which outcome occurs remains…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…
The sustainable use of multicomponent treatments such as combination therapies, combination vaccines/chemicals, and plants carrying multigenic resistance requires an understanding of how their population-wide deployment affects the speed of…
In the context of multistability driven diseases, like cancer, spatiotemporal plasticity plays a significant role to achieve a spectrum of phenotypic variations. The interplay between gene regulatory networks and environmental factors, such…
In evolutionary game theory, an important measure of a mutant trait (strategy) is its ability to invade and take over an otherwise-monomorphic population. Typically, one quantifies the success of a mutant strategy via the probability that a…
Maintaining tissue homeostasis requires appropriate regulation of stem cell differentiation. The Waddington landscape posits that gene circuits in a cell form a potential landscape of different cell types, wherein cells follow attractors of…
We propose a modelling framework to analyse the stochastic behaviour of heterogeneous, multi-scale cellular populations. We illustrate our methodology with a particular example in which we study a population with an oxygen-regulated…
We study the fixation probability of a mutant type when introduced into a resident population. As opposed to the usual assumption of constant pop- ulation size, we allow for stochastically varying population sizes. This is implemented by a…
Cancer cell mutations occur when cells undergo multiple cell divisions, and these mutations can be spontaneous or environmentally-induced. The mechanisms that promote and sustain these mutations are still not fully understood. This study…
The fitness of somatic cells of metazoan, the ability of proliferation and survival, depends on microenvironment. In somatic evolution, a mutated cell in a tissue clonally expands abnormally because of its high fitness as normal cells in a…
Melanoma is an aggressive form of skin cancer. Survival rates are excellent if it is detected early but fall markedly if it metastasises. A key step in early tumour progression is the formation of cell clusters, which can promote…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics in directed and/or weighted networks. We study the fixation probability of a mutant in finite populations in stochastic voter-type dynamics for several update rules. The fixation probability is…