Related papers: Selection for synchronized cell division in simple…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Evolutionary transitions occur when previously-independent replicating entities unite to form more complex individuals. Such transitions have profoundly shaped natural evolutionary history and occur in two forms: fraternal transitions…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
We analyze evolutionary dynamics in a confluent, branching cellular population, such as in a growing duct, vasculature, or in a branching microbial colony. We focus on the coarse-grained features of the evolution and build a statistical…
In many adult tissues, stem cells and differentiated cells are not homogeneously distributed : stem cells are arranged in periodic "niches", and differentiated cells are constantly produced and migrate out of these niches. In this article,…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…
Topological signals, i.e., dynamical variables defined on nodes, links, triangles, etc. of higher-order networks, are attracting increasing attention. However the investigation of their collective phenomena is only at its infancy. Here we…
The emergence of multicellularity and developmental programs are among the major problems of evolutionary biology. Traditionally, research in this area has been based on the combination of data analysis and experimental work on one hand and…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
The combination of protrusions and retractions in the movement of polarized cells leads to understand the effect of possible synchronisation between the two ends of the cells. This synchronisation, in turn, could lead to different dynamics…
New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. By adopting a simple theoretical framework for intra-cellular chemical reaction dynamics with…
Cell differentiation is an important process in living organisms. Differentiation is mostly based on binary decisions with the progenitor cells choosing between two specific lineages. The differentiation dynamics have both deterministic and…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…