Related papers: Tissue evolution: Mechanical interplay of adhesion…

Repeated interaction between individuals is the main mechanism for maintaining cooperation in social dilemma situations. Variants of tit-for-tat (repeating the previous action of the opponent) and the win-stay lose-shift strategy are known…

The evolutionary transition to multicellularity transformed life on earth, allowing for the evolution of large, complex organisms. While multicellularity can be strongly advantageous, its earliest stages bring unique physical challenges.…

Cell proliferation, apoptosis, and myosin-dependent contraction can generate elastic stress and strain in living tissues, which may be dissipated by internal rearrangement through cell topological transition and cytoskeletal reorganization.…

When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and…

We propose a type-dependent branching model with mutation and competition for modeling phylogenies of a virus population. The competition kernel depends for any two virus particles on the particles' types, the total mass of the population…

Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…

We have developed a mathematical model that captures stress-induced mutagenesis, a fundamental aspect of pathogenic and neoplastic evolutionary dynamics, on the fitness landscape with multiple relevant genetic traits as a high-dimensional…

Single and collective cell migration are fundamental processes critical for physiological phenomena ranging from embryonic development and immune response to wound healing and cancer metastasis. To understand cell migration from a physical…

When beneficial mutations are relatively common, competition between multiple unfixed mutations can reduce the rate of fixation in well-mixed asexual populations. We introduce a one dimensional model with a steady accumulation of beneficial…

We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the…

Cell-cell adhesion plays a vital role in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. One of its functions is regulation of cell migration, such as occurs, e.g. during embryogenesis or in cancer. In this work, we develop a…

Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…

Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing fraction is effectively fixed, the prevailing paradigm…

Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…

The interplay between energy efficiency and evolutionary mechanisms is addressed. One important question is how evolutionary mechanisms can select for the optimised usage of energy in situations where it does not lead to immediate…

Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…

We discuss several continuum cell-cell adhesion models based on the underlying microscopic assumptions. We propose an improvement on these models leading to sharp fronts and intermingling invasion fronts between different cell type…

One of the central problems in animal and plant developmental biology is deciphering how chemical and mechanical signals interact within a tissue to produce organs of defined size, shape and function. Cell walls in plants impose a unique…

We study the effect of intratumor heterogeneity in the likelihood of cancer cells moving from a primary tumor to other sites in the human body, generating a metastatic process. We model different scenarios of competition between tumor cells…

Evolutionary game dynamics are often studied in the context of different population structures. Here we propose a new population structure that is inspired by simple multicellular life forms. In our model, cells reproduce but can stay…