Related papers: Speed and fate diversity tradeoff in nematode's ea…
The genetic material of a eukaryotic cell comprises both nuclear DNA (ncDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). These differ markedly in several aspects but nevertheless must encode proteins that are compatible with one another. Here we…
A key feature of many developmental systems is their ability to self-organize spatial patterns of functionally distinct cell fates. To ensure proper biological function, such patterns must be established reproducibly, by controlling and…
The unwelcome evolution of malignancy during cancer progression emerges through a selection process in a complex heterogeneous population structure. In the present work, we investigate evolutionary dynamics in a phenotypically heterogeneous…
Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…
Proteins are translated from the N- to the C-terminus, raising the basic question of how this innate directionality affects their evolution. To explore this question, we analyze 16,200 structures from the protein data bank (PDB). We find…
The process controlling the diferentiation of stem, or progenitor, cells into one specific functional direction is called lineage specification. An important characteristic of this process is the multi-lineage priming, which requires the…
Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living soil nematode, propels itself by producing undulatory body motion and displays a rich variety of body shapes and trajectories during its locomotion in complex environments. Here we show that the complex…
The early fly embryo offers a relatively pure version of the problem of spatial scaling in biological pattern formation. Within three hours, a "blueprint" for the final segmented body plan of the animal is visible in striped patterns of…
We analyse the neural dynamics and its relation with the emergent behaviour of a robotic vehicle that is controlled by a neural network numerical simulation based on the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The robot…
A major challenge in analyzing animal behavior is to discover some underlying simplicity in complex motor actions. Here we show that the space of shapes adopted by the nematode C. elegans is surprisingly low dimensional, with just four…
We consider a multiscale stochastic compartmental model with three types of cells (stem cells, immature cells and mature cells) which combines cell proliferation and cell differentiation. We derive a hydrodynamic limit when the number of…
We investigate the intergenerational shape dynamics of single Caulobacter crescentus cells using a novel combination of imaging techniques and theoretical modeling. We determine the dynamics of cell pole-to-pole lengths, cross-sectional…
Asymmetric partition of fate determinants during cell division is a hallmark of cell differentiation. Recent work suggested that such a mechanism is hijacked by cancer cells to increase both their phenotypic heterogeneity and plasticity and…
We investigate how locomotory behavior is generated in the brain focusing on the paradigmatic connectome of nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) and on neuronal activity patterns that control forward locomotion. We map the neuronal…
How far is neuroepithelial cell proliferation in the developing central nervous system a deterministic process? Or, to put it in a more precise way, how accurately can it be described by a deterministic mathematical model? To provide tracks…
The dynamics of complex systems generally include high-dimensional, non-stationary and non-linear behavior, all of which pose fundamental challenges to quantitative understanding. To address these difficulties we detail a new approach based…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
Developing epithelial tissues coordinate cell proliferation and mechanical forces to achieve proper size and shape. As epithelial cells tightly adhere together to form the confluent tissue, the distribution of cell areas significantly…
The population dynamics theory of B cells in a typical germinal center could play an important role in revealing how affinity maturation is achieved. However, the existing models encountered some conflicts with experiments. To resolve these…
Multicellular tissues are the building blocks of many biological systems and organs. These tissues are not static, but dynamically change over time. Even if the overall structure remains the same there is a turnover of cells within the…