Related papers: Linking lineage and population observables in biol…
Stem cells, through their ability to produce daughter stem cells and differentiate into specialized cells, are essential in the growth, maintenance, and repair of biological tissues. Understanding the dynamics of cell populations in the…
A discrete time branching process where the offspring distribution is generation-dependent, and the number of reproductive individuals is controlled by a random mechanism is considered. This model is a Markov chain but, in general, the…
The goal of this article is to contribute towards the conceptual and quantitative understanding of the evolutionary benefits for (microbial) populations to maintain a seed bank (consisting of dormant individuals) when facing fluctuating…
We consider a particle system in continuous time, discrete population, with spatial motion and nonlocal branching. The offspring's weights and their number may depend on the mother's weight. Our setting captures, for instance, the processes…
Phylogenetic trees represent the evolutionary relationships between extant lineages, where extinct or non-sampled lineages are omitted. Extending the work of Stadler and collaborators, this paper focuses on the branch lengths in…
We calculate the density and expectation for the number of lineages in a reconstructed tree with $n$ extant species. This is done with conditioning on the age of the tree as well as with assuming a uniform prior for the age of the tree.
Cells actively regulate their size during the cell cycle to maintain volume homeostasis across generations. While various mathematical models of cell size regulation have been proposed to explain how this is achieved, relating these models…
Cell lineage statistics is a powerful tool for inferring cellular parameters, such as division rate, death rate or the population growth rate. Yet, in practice such an analysis suffers from a basic problem: how should we treat incomplete…
Coalescent theory combined with statistical modeling allows us to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. When sequences are sampled serially through…
Development combines three basic processes asymmetric --- cell division, signaling and gene regulation --- in a multitude of ways to create an overwhelming diversity of multicellular life-forms. Here, we attempt to chart this diversity…
In this work we model the dynamics of a population that evolves as a continuous time branching process with a trait structure and ecological interactions in form of mutations and competition between individuals. We generalize existing…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
Cellular phenotype is characterized by different components such as cell size, protein content and cell cycle time. These are global variables that are the outcome of multiple internal microscopic processes. Accordingly, they display some…
Stochastic models of sequential mutation acquisition are widely used to quantify cancer and bacterial evolution. Across manifold scenarios, recurrent research questions are: how many cells are there with $n$ alterations, and how long will…
For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to…
We give a short overview on our work on ancestral lineages in spatial population models with local regulation. We explain how an ancestral lineage can be interpreted as a random walk in a dynamic random environment. Defining regeneration…
Branching processes are classical growth models in cell kinetics. In their construction, it is usually assumed that cell lifetimes are independent random variables, which has been proved false in experiments. Models of dependent lifetimes…
We study a size-structured population model in which individual cells grow at a rate determined by a fluctuating internal variable (e.g., gene expression levels). Many previous models of phenotypically heterogeneous populations can be…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…