Related papers: Insular microbiogeography
The interplay between space and evolution is an important issue in population dynamics, that is in particular crucial in the emergence of polymorphism and spatial patterns. Recently, biological studies suggest that invasion and evolution…
The composition of cellular metabolism is different across species. Empirical data reveal that bacterial species contain similar numbers of metabolic reactions but that the cross-species popularity of reactions is so heterogenous that some…
Biological approximations, which are universal for diverse species, are well known. With no other experimental data, their invariance to transformations from one species to another yields exact conservation (with respect to biological…
Using game theory we provide mathematical proof that if a species of asexually reproducing microbes does not possess maximum variability in competitive abilities amongst its individual organisms, then that species is vulnerable to…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
Interacting proteins coevolve at multiple but interconnected scales, from the residue-residue over the protein-protein up to the family-family level. The recent accumulation of enormous amounts of sequence data allows for the development of…
Multicellular self-organization drives development in biological organisms, yet a comprehensive theory is lacking as basic properties of cells can complicate common approaches. Framing such properties by dynamic graphs led to new…
Variation and selection are the core principles of Darwinian evolution, yet quantitatively relating the diversity of a population to its capacity to respond to selection is challenging. Here, we examine this problem at a molecular level in…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
A dynamical systems scenario for developmental cell biology is proposed, based on numerical studies of a system with interacting units with internal dynamics and reproduction. Diversification, formation of discrete and recursive types, and…
Based on statistical analysis of the complete genome sequences, a remote relationship has been observed between the evolution of the genetic code and the three domain tree of life. The existence of such a remote relationship need to be…
A theory of relative species abundance on sparsely-connected networks is presented by investigating the replicator dynamics with symmetric interactions. Sparseness of a network involves difficulty in analyzing the fixed points of the…
It has been a century since the species-area relationship (SAR) was first proposed as a power law to explain how species richness scales with area. There have been many attempts to explain the origin of this predominant form. Apart from the…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
How mutations accumulate in genomes is the central question of molecular evolution theories, however our understanding of this process is far from complete. Drake's rule is a notoriously universal property of genomes from microbes to…
Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
A great variety of molecular components is encapsulated in cells. Each of these components is replicated for cell reproduction. To address an essential role of the huge diversity of cellular components, we study a model of protocells that…
Multipartite viruses replicate through a puzzling evolutionary strategy. Their genome is segmented into two or more parts, and encapsidated in separate particles that appear to propagate independently. Completing the replication cycle,…