Related papers: Optimal intercellular competition in senescence an…

The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…

Metazoans are capable of gathering information from their environments and respond in predictable ways. These computational tasks are achieved by means of more or less complex networks of neurons. Task performance must be reliable over an…

If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…

Aging remains a fundamental open problem in modern biology. Although there exist a number of theories on aging on the cellular scale, nearly nothing is known about how microscopic failures cascade to macroscopic failures of tissues, organs…

Cooperation and competition coexist and coevolve in natural and social systems. Cooperation generates resources, which in turn, drive non-cooperative competition to secure individual shares. How this complex interplay between cooperation…

Cancer cells obtain mutations which rely on the production of diffusible growth factors to confer a fitness benefit. These mutations can be considered cooperative, and studied as public goods games within the framework of evolutionary game…

Although there are various types of cancer treatments, none of these currently take into account the effect of ageing of the immune system and hence altered responses to cancer. Recent studies have shown that in vitro stimulation of T cells…

We investigate a novel approach to resilient distributed optimization with quadratic costs in a multi-agent system prone to unexpected events that make some agents misbehave. In contrast to commonly adopted filtering strategies, we draw…

The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…

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,…

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…

It is a well-established fact that tumors up-regulate glucose consumption to meet increasing demands for rapidly available energy by switching to purely glycolytic mode of glucose metabolism. What is often neglected is that cytotoxic cells…

The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…

The study of immune system aging, i.e. immunosenescence, is a relatively new research topic. It deals with understanding the processes of immunodegradation that indicate signs of functionality loss possibly leading to death. Even though it…

The intratumor heterogeneity has been recognized to characterize cancer cells impairing the efficacy of cancer treatments. We here propose an extension of constraint-based modeling approach in order to simulate metabolism of cell…

The gradual accumulation of damage and dysregulation during the aging of living organisms can be quantified. Even so, the aging process is complex and has multiple interacting physiological scales -- from the molecular to cellular to whole…

What is aging? Mechanistic answers to this question remain elusive despite decades of research. Here, we propose a mathematical model of cellular aging based on a model gene interaction network. Our network model is made of only non-aging…

Any process in which competing solutions replicate with errors and numbers of their copies depend on their respective fitnesses is the evolutionary optimization process. As during carcinogenesis mutated genomes replicate according to their…

We explain how hierarchical organization of biological systems emerges naturally during evolution, through a transition in the units of individuality. We will show how these transitions are the result of competing selective forces operating…

At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…