Related papers: From single-cell variability to population growth
An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place --…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Understanding how stochastic and non-linear deterministic processes interact is a major challenge in population dynamics theory. After a short review, we introduce a stochastic individual-centered particle model to describe the evolution in…
We present an algorithm for the stochastic simulation of gene expression and heterogeneous population dynamics. The algorithm combines an exact method to simulate molecular-level fluctuations in single cells and a constant-number Monte…
We study the role of phylogenetic trees on correlations in mutation processes. Generally, correlations decay exponentially with the generation number. We find that two distinct regimes of behavior exist. For mutation rates smaller than a…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales. However, these two types of processes are nowadays well documented to much more tightly than traditionally assumed,…
We analyse a series of bacterial growth models with in-built inter-individual variation in rates of cell division. We show that this variation leads to reduced population growth in favorable regimes and reduced population killing in…
This paper theoretically analyzes a phenomenological stochastic model for bacterial growth. This model comprises cell division and the linear growth of cells, where growth rates and cell cycles are drawn from lognormal distributions. We…
The self-organization of cells into complex tissues relies on a tight coordination of cell behavior. Identifying the cellular processes driving tissue growth is key to understanding the emergence of tissue forms and devising targeted…
We analyze a size-structured branching process in which individual cells grow exponentially according to a Feller square-root process and divide under general size-control mechanisms. We obtain exact expressions for the asymptotic…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…
In multicellular organisms, several cell states coexist. For determining each cell type, cell-cell interactions are often essential, in addition to intracellular gene expression dynamics. Based on dynamical systems theory, we propose a…
The growth of a population divided among spatial sites, with migration between the sites, is sometimes modelled by a product of random matrices, with each diagonal elements representing the growth rate in a given time period, and…
We consider a stochastic individual-based model of adaptive dynamics for an asexually reproducing population with mutation, with linear birth and death rates, as well as a density-dependent competition. To depict repeating changes of the…
We investigate the dynamics of the voter model in which the population itself changes endogenously via the birth-death process. There are two species of voters, labeled A and B, and the population of each species can grow or shrink by the…
Biological time can be measured in two ways: in generations and in physical (chronological) time. When generations overlap, these two notions diverge, which impedes our ability to relate mathematical models to real populations. In this…
We investigate a model of cell division in which the length of telomeres within the cell regulate their proliferative potential. At each cell division the ends of linear chromosomes change and a cell becomes senescent when one or more of…