Related papers: Criticality in Cell Differentiation
Spatial patterns in the early fruit fly embryo emerge from a network of interactions among transcription factors, the gap genes, driven by maternal inputs. Such networks can exhibit many qualitatively different behaviors, separated by…
Density dependence is important in the ecology and evolution of microbial and cancer cells. Typically, we can only measure net growth rates, but the underlying density-dependent mechanisms that give rise to the observed dynamics can…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
Spreading processes on networks are ubiquitous in both human-made and natural systems. Understanding their behavior is of broad interest; from the control of epidemics to understanding brain dynamics. While in some cases there exists a…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
The properties of a front between two different phases in the presence of a smoothly inhomogeneous external field that takes its critical value at the crossing point is analyzed. Two generic scenarios are studied. In the first, the system…
The deluge of single-cell data obtained by sequencing, imaging and epigenetic markers has led to an increasingly detailed description of cell state. However, it remains challenging to identify how cells transition between different states,…
Mathematical models of stem cell differentiation are commonly based upon the concept of subsequent cell fate decisions, each controlled by a gene regulatory network. These networks exhibit a multistable behavior and cause the system to…
Segregation of different cell types is a crucial process for the pattern formation in tissues, in particular during embryogenesis. Since the involved cell interactions are complex and difficult to measure individually in experiments,…
Key traits of unicellular species, like cell size, often follow scale-free or self-similar distributions, hinting at the possibility of an underlying critical process. However, linking such empirical scaling laws to the critical regime of…
We study the asymptotic behaviors of stochastic cell fate decision between proliferation and differentiation. We propose a model of a self-replicating Langevin system, where cells choose their fate (i.e. proliferation or differentiation)…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Cell functional diversity is a significant determinant on how biological processes unfold. Most accounts of diversity involve a search for sequence or expression differences. Perhaps there are more subtle mechanisms at work. Using the…
Biological systems with many components often exhibit seemingly critical behaviors, characterized by atypically large correlated fluctuations. Yet the underlying causes remain unclear. Here we define and examine two types of criticality.…
The critical brain hypothesis posits that neural systems operate near a phase transition, optimizing the processing of information. While scale invariance and non-Gaussian dynamics--hallmarks of criticality--have been observed in brain…
In complex systems, external parameters often determine the phase in which the system operates, i.e., its macroscopic behavior. For nearly a century, statistical physics has extensively studied systems' transitions across phases,…
A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…
Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…