Related papers: Universality of clone dynamics during tissue devel…
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 build networks of genetic similarity in which the nodes are organisms sampled from biological populations. The procedure is illustrated by constructing networks from genetic data of a marine clonal plant. An important feature in the…
The rules governing cell division and differentiation are central to understanding the mechanisms of development, aging and cancer. By utilising inducible genetic labelling, recent studies have shown that the clonal population in transgenic…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
The adaptive immune system responds to pathogens by selecting clones of cells with specific receptors. While clonal selection in response to particular antigens has been studied in detail, it is unknown how a lifetime of exposures to many…
Key traits of unicellular species, like cell size, often follow scale-free or self-similar distributions, hinting at the possibility of an underlying critical process. However, linking such empirical scaling laws to the critical regime of…
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…
The dynamic properties of a classical tracer particle in a random, disordered medium are investigated close to the localization transition. For Lorentz models obeying Newtonian and diffusive motion at the microscale, we have performed…
When a system is brought to a metastable state, nuclei of the equilibrium phase form and grow. This is the well-known nucleation and growth of first-order phase transitions. Near a critical point of a continuous phase transition, critical…
Biological tools such as genetic lineage tracing, three dimensional confocal microscopy and next generation DNA sequencing are providing new ways to quantify the distribution of clones of normal and mutated cells. Population-wide clone size…
Anomalous diffusion phenomena occur on length scales spanning from intracellular to astrophysical ranges. A specific form of decay at large argument of the probability density function of rescaled displacement (scaling function) is derived…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
We model a general, hierarchically organized tissue by a multi compartment approach, allowing any number of mutations within a cell. We derive closed solutions for the deterministic clonal dynamics and the reproductive capacity of single…
Dynamics of coarsening of a statistically homogeneous fractal cluster, created by a morphological instability of diffusion-controlled growth, is investigated theoretically. An exact mathematical setting of the problem is presented that…
Droplet condensation on surfaces produces patterns, called breath figures. Their evolution into self-similar structures is a classical example of self-organization. It is described by a scaling theory with scaling functions whose…
We consider an exponentially growing population of cells undergoing mutations and ask about the effect of reproductive fluctuations (genetic drift) on its long-term evolution. We combine first step analysis with the stochastic dynamics of a…
The objective of statistical physics is to understand macroscopic behavior of a many-body system from the interactions of the constituents of that system. When many-body systems reach critical states, simple universal and scaling behaviors…
Growth patterns of complex systems predict how they change in sizes, numbers, masses, etc. Understanding growth is important, especially for many biological, ecological, urban, and socioeconomic systems. One noteworthy growth behavior is…
In species reproducing both sexually and asexually clones are often more common in recently established populations. Earlier studies have suggested that this pattern arises from natural selection favouring asexual recruitment in young…
The presence of dynamical heterogeneities, i.e. nanometer-scale regions containing molecules rearranging cooperatively at very different rates compared to the bulk, is increasingly being recognized as crucial in our understanding of the…