Related papers: Symmetry-Breaking in Plant Stems
Sexual reproduction presents significant challenges to formal treatment of evolutionary processes. A starting point for systematic treatments of ecological and evolutionary phenomena has been provided by the gene centered view of evolution…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
This paper investigates a model of plant organ placement motivated by the appearance of large Fibonacci numbers in phyllotaxis, and provides the first large-scale empirical validation of this model. Specifically it evaluates the ability of…
We formulate a statistical-mechanical description of a recently introduced random planting model in which plants are represented by growing hard disks. Seedlings of negligible size are introduced at random positions in a field, grow at a…
The quantitative description of marine systems is constrained by a major issue of scale separation: most marine biochemical processes occur at sub-centimeter scales, while the contribution to the Earth's biogeochemical cycles is expressed…
It is proposed that the co-expression of statistically significant motifs among the sequences of a proteome is a phylogenetic trait. From the co-expression matrix of such motifs in a group of prokaryotic proteomes a suitable definition of a…
We present the first analytical and numerical studies of the initial stage of the branching process based on an interface dynamics streamer model in the fully 3-D case. This model follows from fundamental considerations on charge production…
In this PhD thesis, I investigate the properties of symmetry-breaking dynamical phase transitions that manifest in the fluctuations of time-integrated observables within classical systems. In particular, I analyze how these phase…
The ambitious and ultimate research purpose in Systems Biology is the understanding and modelling of the cell's system. Although a vast number of models have been developed in order to extract biological knowledge from complex systems…
We introduce and analyze several aspects of a new model for cell differentiation. It assumes that differentiation of progenitor cells is a continuous process. From the mathematical point of view, it is based on partial differential…
Key traits of unicellular species, like cell size, often follow scale-free or self-similar distributions, hinting at the possibility of an underlying critical process. However, linking such empirical scaling laws to the critical regime of…
Everyday experience shows that cellular sheets are stiffened by the presence of a pressurized gas: from bicycle inner tubes to bubble wrap, the presence of an internal pressure increases the stiffness of otherwise floppy structures. The…
We will analyze through a first order perturbative formulation the local loss of symmetry when a source of electromagnetic and gravitational field interacts with an agent that perturbs the original geometry associated to the source. As the…
Two coarse-grained models which capture some universal characteristics of stripe forming systems are stud- ied. At high temperatures, the structure factors of both models attain their maxima on a circle in reciprocal space, as a consequence…
Experimental data that prove the existence of the zygotic combinatorial process occurring in an embryogenesis-entering zygote are presented in the paper. The zygotic combinatorial process is found when analyzing F1 hybrid plants obtained…
In growing active matter systems, a large collection of engineered or living autonomous units metabolize free energy and create order at different length scales as they proliferate and migrate collectively. One such example is bacterial…
We introduce a formalism for the geometry of eukaryotic cells and organisms.Cells are taken to be star-convex with good biological reason. This allows for a convenient description of their extent in space as well as all manner of cell…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
The interplay between the diffusion-controlled dynamics of a solidification front and the trajectory of a grain boundary groove at the solid-liquid interface is studied by means of thin-sample directional solidification experiments of a…
The formation of vegetation patterns in the arid and the semi-arid climatic zones is studied. Threshold for the biomass of the perennial flora is shown to be a relevant factor, leading to a frozen disordered patterns in the arid zone. In…