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Multicellular self-organization drives development in biological organisms, yet a comprehensive theory is lacking as basic properties of cells can complicate common approaches. Framing such properties by dynamic graphs led to new…
Prokaryotes do not make use of a nucleus membrane to segregate their genetic material from the cytoplasm, so that their nucleoid is potentially free to explore the whole volume of the cell. Nonetheless, high resolution images of bacteria…
Active matter exhibits remarkable collective behavior in which flows, continuously generated by active particles, are intertwined with the orientational order of these particles. The relationship remains poorly understood as the activity…
The X chromosome is present as a single copy in the heterogametic sex, and this hemizygosity is expected to drive unusual patterns of evolution on the X relative to the autosomes. For example, the hemizgosity of the X may lead to a lower…
A wide spectrum of Peritrichous bacteria undergo considerable physiological changes when they are inoculated onto nutrition-rich surfaces and exhibit a rapid and collective migration denoted as swarming. Thereby, the length of such swarmer…
Conjugation is a central characteristic of plasmid biology and an important mechanism of horizontal gene transfer in bacteria. However, there is little consensus on how to accurately estimate and report plasmid conjugation rates, in part…
Why sex evolved and it prevails in nature remains one of the great puzzles of evolution. Most biologists would explain that it promotes genetic variability, however this explanation suffers from several difficulties. What advantages might…
Generating molecules, both in a directed and undirected fashion, is a huge part of the drug discovery pipeline. Genetic algorithms (GAs) generate molecules by randomly modifying known molecules. In this paper we show that GAs are very…
Cells in a developing embryo have no direct way of "measuring" their physical position. Through a variety of processes, however, the expression levels of multiple genes come to be correlated with position, and these expression levels thus…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…
Genome organization in eukaryotes during interphase stems from the delicate balance between non-random correlations present in the DNA polynucleotide linear sequence and the physico/chemical reactions which shape continuously the form and…
Bacteriophages are central to microbial ecosystems for balancing bacterial populations and promoting evolution by applying strong selection pressure. Here we review some of the known aspects that modulate phage-bacteria interaction in a way…
Understanding the motion of particles with ligand-receptors is important for biomedical applications and material design. Yet, even among a single design, the prototypical DNA-coated colloids, seemingly similar micrometric particles hop or…
The bioinformatical methods to detect lateral gene transfer events are mainly based on functional coding DNA characteristics. In this paper, we propose the use of DNA traits not depending on protein coding requirements. We introduce several…
Through in-depth thinking and reasoning about the conditions required for cells to maintain unchanged material distribution, it is concluded that life metabolic reactions require high information content. However, the self-replication of a…
Bacterial genomes and large-scale computer software projects both consist of a large number of components (genes or software packages) connected via a network of mutual dependencies. Components can be easily added or removed from individual…
Social networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric…
Dispersal is ubiquitous throughout the tree of life: factors selecting for dispersal include kin competition, inbreeding avoidance and spatiotemporal variation in resources or habitat suitability. These factors differ in whether they…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…