Related papers: Reexamining a Geometric Theory of Biological Growt…
The Eden cell growth model is a simple discrete stochastic process which produces a "blob" in $\mathbb{R}^d$: start with one cube in the regular grid, and at each time step add a neighboring cube uniformly at random. This process has been…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
A new model for biological growth is introduced that couples the geometry of an organism (or part of the organism) to the flow and deposition of material. The model has three dynamical variables (a) a Riemann metric tensor for the geometry,…
A novel fertility model based on Thom's nonlinear differential equations of morphogenesis is presented, utilizing a three-dimensional catastrophe surface to capture the interaction between latent non-catastrophic fertility factors and…
"Self-organization" has become a watchword in developmental biology, characterizing observations in which embryonic or induced stem cells of animals replicate morphological steps and outcomes seen in intact embryos. While the term was…
Embryonic development leads to the reproducible and ordered appearance of complexity from egg to adult. The successive differentiation of different cell types, that elaborates this complexity, result from the activity of gene networks and…
Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in…
We study self-organization in a minimally nonlinear model of large random ecosystems. Populations evolve over time according to a piecewise linear system of ordinary differential equations subject to a non-negativity constraint resulting in…
Many biological systems collectively construct complex, adaptive, and functional architectures, where function emerges from bottom-up building processes rather than top-down planning or centralized control. However, general strategies for…
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…
This paper provides a unified mathematical analysis of a family of non-local diffuse interface models for tumor growth describing evolutions driven by long-range interactions. These integro-partial differential equations model cell-to-cell…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
In this paper we address some modelling issues related to biological growth. Our treatment is based on a recently-proposed, general formulation for growth within the context of Mixture Theory (Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids,…
Despite their claimed biological plausibility, most self organizing networks have strict topological constraints and consequently they cannot take into account a wide range of external stimuli. Furthermore their evolution is conditioned by…
Understanding biological phenomena requires a systemic approach that incorporates different mechanisms acting on different spatial and temporal scales, since in organisms the workings of all components, such as organelles, cells, and organs…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of an idealised model for the robust self-assembly of two-dimensional structures called polyominoes. The model includes rules that encode interactions between sets of square tiles that drive the…
The living organism is considered as an open system, whereas Prigogine's approach to the thermodynamics of such systems is used. The approach allows one to formulate the law of individual growth and development (ontogenesis) of the living…
We consider a free boundary problem for a system of PDEs, modeling the growth of a biological tissue. A morphogen, controlling volume growth, is produced by specific cells and then diffused and absorbed throughout the domain. The geometric…
In this work, a new model for macroscopic plant tissue growth based on dynamical Riemannian geometry is presented. We treat 1D and 2D tissues as continuous, deformable, growing geometries for sizes larger than 1mm. The dynamics of the…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…