Related papers: Evolutionary advantage of cell size control
Deterministic evolutionary theory robustly predicts that populations displaying altruistic behaviours will be driven to extinction by mutant cheats that absorb common benefits but do not themselves contribute. Here we show that when…
The relationship between microscopic observations and macroscopic behavior is a fundamental open question in biophysical systems. Here, we develop a unified approach that---in contrast with existing methods---predicts cell type from…
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
A fundamental question in biology is how cell populations evolve into different subtypes based on homogeneous processes at the single cell level. Here we show that population bimodality can emerge even when biological processes are…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
It is well known that the different cell-division models, such as Timer, Sizer, and Adder, can be distinguished based on the correlations between different single-cell-level quantities such as birth-size, division-time, division-size, and…
The population structure often impacts evolutionary dynamics. In constant-selection evolutionary dynamics between two types, amplifiers of selection are networks that promote the fitter mutant to take over the entire population, and…
We study a population of $N$ individuals evolving according to a biparental Moran model with two types, one being advantaged compared to the other. The advantage is conferred by a Mendelian mutation, which reduces the death probability of…
We consider the accumulation of beneficial and deleterious mutations in large asexual populations. The rate of adaptation is affected by the total mutation rate, proportion of beneficial mutations and population size $N$. We show that…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
The control of biological systems presents interesting applications such as cell reprogramming or drug target identification. A common type of control strategy consists in a set of interventions that, by fixing the values of some variables,…
We consider a class of biologically-motivated stochastic processes in which a unicellular organism divides its resources (volume or damaged proteins, in particular) symmetrically or asymmetrically between its progeny. Assuming the final…
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…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
Understanding the emergence and evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation is a core problem in biology. We develop a quantitative model that shows that a multicellular form emerges from genetically identical unicellular…
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…
We propose a modelling framework to analyse the stochastic behaviour of heterogeneous, multi-scale cellular populations. We illustrate our methodology with a particular example in which we study a population with an oxygen-regulated…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
Using Monte Carlo model of biological evolution we have discovered that populations can switch between two different strategies of their genomes' evolution; Darwinian purifying selection and complementing the haplotypes. The first one is…