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Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
Phase separation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatial organization inside biological cells. However, despite the clear relevance to virtually all physiological functions, we understand surprisingly little about what phases…
Gene expression is inherently noisy, posing a challenge to understanding how precise and reproducible patterns of gene expression emerge in mammals. We investigate this phenomenon using gastruloids, an in vitro model for early mammalian…
A theoretical study of cell evolution is presented here. By using a toolbox containing an intracellular catalytic reaction network model and a mutation-selection process, four distinct phases of self-organization were unveiled. First, the…
Although continuous advances in theoretical modelling of Molecular Communications (MC) are observed, there is still an insuperable gap between theory and experimental testbeds, especially at the microscale. In this paper, the development of…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
Chlamydiae are bacteria with an interesting unusual developmental cycle. A single bacterium in its infectious form (elementary body, EB) enters the host cell, where it converts into its dividing form (reticulate body, RB), and divides by…
Bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) -- which include skeletal stem cells -- are a promising tool in regenerative medicine. However, their heterogeneous and unpredictable in vivo behaviour remains a critical barrier preventing the development…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
Numerous biological approaches are available to characterise the mechanisms which govern the formation of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) colonies. To understand how the kinematics of single and pairs of hESCs impact colony formation, we…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
With the completion of human genome mapping, the focus of scientists seeking to explain the biological complexity of living systems is shifting from analyzing the individual components (such as a particular gene or biochemical reaction) to…
Populations of mammalian stem cells commonly exhibit considerable cell-cell variability. However, the functional role of this diversity is unclear. Here, we analyze expression fluctuations of the stem cell surface marker Sca1 in mouse…
The process of morphogenesis is an evolution of the shape of an organism together with the differentiation of its parts. This process encompasses numerous biological processes ranging from embryogenesis to regeneration following crisis such…
Development in multi-cellular organisms is marked by a high degree of spatial organization of the cells attaining distinct fates in the embryo. We show that receptor-ligand interaction between cells in close physical proximity adaptively…
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…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
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…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…