Related papers: Epigenetic Ratchet: Spontaneous Adaptation via Sto…
How can a microorganism adapt to a variety of environmental conditions despite there exists a limited number of signal transduction machineries? We show that for any growing cells whose gene expression is under stochastic fluctuations,…
The significant role of epigenetic mechanisms within natural systems has become increasingly clear. This paper uses a recently presented abstract, tunable Boolean genetic regulatory network model to explore aspects of epigenetics. It is…
We propose and analyze a stochastic model to investigate epigenetic mutations, i.e., modifications of the genetic information that control gene expression patterns in a cell but do not alter the DNA sequence. Epigenetic mutations are…
Gene regulation is an important fundamental biological process. The regulation of gene expression is managed through a variety of methods including epigenetic processes (e.g., DNA methylation). Understanding the role of epigenetic changes…
Cells often exhibit different and stable phenotypes from the same DNA sequence. Robustness and plasticity of such cellular states are controlled by diverse transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms, among them the modification of…
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…
Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…
Timing is essential for many cellular processes, from cellular responses to external stimuli to the cell cycle and circadian clocks. Many of these processes are based on gene expression. For example, an activated gene may be required to…
Living systems adapt to various environmental conditions by changing their internal states. Inspired by gene expression and epigenetic modification dynamics, we herein propose a generic mechanism for adaptation by combining fast oscillatory…
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…
Understanding the relationship between spontaneous stochastic fluctuations and the topology of the underlying gene regulatory network is of fundamental importance for the study of single-cell stochastic gene expression. Here by solving the…
The recent development of single-cell transcriptomics has enabled gene expression to be measured in individual cells instead of being population-averaged. Despite this considerable precision improvement, inferring regulatory networks…
Epigenetic histone modifications play an important role in the maintenance of different cell phenotypes. The exact molecular mechanism for inheritance of the modification patterns over cell generations remains elusive. We construct a…
Stochastic simulation can make the molecular processes of cellular control more vivid than the traditional differential-equation approach by generating typical system histories instead of just statistical measures such as the mean and…
Many biological processes have been the source of inspiration for heuristic methods that generate high-quality solutions to solve optimization and search problems. This thesis presents an epigenetic technique for Evolutionary Algorithms,…
Cell fate determination, the process through which cells commit to differentiated states is commonly mediated by gene regulatory motifs with mutually exclusive expression states. The classical deterministic picture for cell fate…
How much information does a cell inherit from its ancestors beyond its genetic sequence? What are the epigenetic mechanisms that allow this? Despite the rise in available epigenetic data, how such information is inherited through the cell…
Auto-regulatory feedback loops are one of the most common network motifs. A wide variety of stochastic models have been constructed to understand how the fluctuations in protein numbers in these loops are influenced by the kinetic…
Gene expression is inherently noisy as many steps in the read-out of the genetic information are stochastic. To disentangle the effect of different sources of stochasticity in such systems, we consider various models that describe some…
The diversity of cell populations is regulated by extracellular and intracellular variability. The latter includes genetic, epigenetic and stochastic variability, all contributing to the experimentally observed heterogeneity in response to…