Related papers: Cell cycle heritability and localization phase tra…

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…

Comprehensive models of stochastic, clonally reproducing populations are defined in terms of general branching processes, allowing birth during maternal life, as for higher organisms, or by splitting, as in cell division. The populations…

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 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…

Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…

We develop the qualitative theory of the solutions of the McKendrick partial differential equation of population dynamics. We calculate explicitly the weak solutions of the McKendrick equation and of the Lotka renewal integral equation with…

Using demographic data of high spatial resolution for a region in the south of Europe, we study the population over fixed-size spatial cells. We find that, counterintuitively, the distribution of the number of inhabitants per cell increases…

Understanding the emergence and evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation is a core problem in biology. We develop a quantitative model that shows that a multicellular form emerges from genetically identical unicellular…

Tumors are defined by their intense proliferation, but sometimes cancer cells turn senescent and stop replicating. In the stochastic cancer model in which all cells are tumorigenic, senescence is seen as the result of random mutations,…

Cell differentiation in multicellular organisms is a complex process whose mechanism can be understood by a reductionist approach, in which the individual processes that control the generation of different cell types are identified.…

We aim to understand the evolution of the genetic composition of cancer cell populations. To achieve this, we consider an individual-based model representing a cell population where cells divide, die and mutate along the edges of a finite…

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…

Heterogeneities in environmental conditions often induce corresponding heterogeneities in the distribution of species. In the extreme case of a localized patch of increased growth rates, reproducing populations can become strongly…

It has been recently shown that the exponential growth rate of a population of bacterial cells starting from a single cell shows transient oscillations due to early synchronized bursts of division. These oscillations are enhanced by cell…

Isogenic Escherichia coli growing exponentially in a constant environment display large variation in growth-rates, division-sizes and generation-times. It is unclear how these seemingly random cell cycles can be reconciled with the precise…

Periodic forcing of nonlinear oscillators leads to a large number of dynamic behaviors. The coupling of the cell-cycle to the circadian clock provides a biological realization of such forcing. Using high throughput single-cell microscopy,…

The coalescent is a stochastic process representing ancestral lineages in a population undergoing neutral genetic drift. Originally defined for a well-mixed population, the coalescent has been adapted in various ways to accommodate spatial,…

We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…

Response time-delay is an ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. Here we use a simple stochastic population model with time-delayed switching-rate conversion to quantitatively study the biological influence of the response time-delay…

The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…