Related papers: Inter-cellular Interactions and Patterns: Vertebra…
A fundamental question in biology is how cell populations evolve into different subtypes based on homogeneous processes at the single cell level. Here we show that population bimodality can emerge even when biological processes are…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
How are granular details of stochastic growth and division of individual cells reflected in smooth deterministic growth of population numbers? We provide an integrated, multiscale perspective of microbial growth dynamics by formulating a…
Many biological tissues are viscoelastic, behaving as elastic solids on short timescales and fluids on long timescales. This collective mechanical behavior enables and helps to guide pattern formation and tissue layering. Here we…
Across metazoans, early embryos exhibit a strikingly conserved slowing down of their cell duplication speed, despite widely varying developmental paces and underlying molecular mechanisms. Here we show that this common behavior arises…
We propose a three dimensional mechanical model of embryonic tissue dynamics. Mechanically coupled adherent cells are represented as particles interconnected with elastic beams which can exert non-central forces and torques. Tissue…
Living systems self-organize in ways that conventional physical frameworks-based on forces, energies, and continuous fields-cannot fully capture. Processes like gene regulation and cellular decision-making involve rule-based logic and…
Flocks of birds and schools of fish are familiar examples of spatial patterns formed by living organisms. In contrast to the patterns on the skins of, say, zebra and giraffe, the patterns of our interest are {\it transient} although…
The reproduction of a living cell requires a repeatable set of chemical events to be properly coordinated. Such events define a replication cycle, coupling the growth and shape change of the cell membrane with internal metabolic reactions.…
A coupled map is suggested to investigate various spatial or temporal designs in biology: Several cells (or tissues) in an organ are considered as connected to each other in terms of some molecular diffusions or electrical potential…
In vitro cultures of endothelial cells are a widely used model system of the collective behavior of endothelial cells during vasculogenesis and angiogenesis. When seeded in an extracellular matrix, endothelial cells can form blood…
Single-cell experiments have revealed cell-to-cell variability in generation times and growth rates for genetically identical cells. Theoretical models relating the fluctuating generation times of single cells to the population growth rate…
Self-organization is a fundamental process of complex biological systems, particularly during the early stages of development. In the mammalian embryo, blastocyst formation exemplifies a self-organized system, involving the correct…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
In this article, I put forward the idea that the neoplastic process (NP) has deep evolutionary roots and make specific predictions about the connection between cancer and the formation of the first embryo, which allowed for the evolutionary…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Protoplanets develop via collisions between planetesimals and planetary embryos in the final assembly stage of planet formation. The efficiency of the planet formation can be defined by the mass ratio between formed protoplanets and the…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
Composition is a powerful principle for systems biology, focused on the interfaces, interconnections, and orchestration of distributed processes to enable integrative multiscale simulations. Whereas traditional models focus on the structure…