Related papers: Precise and scalable self-organization in mammalia…
The capacity of cells and organisms to respond to challenging conditions in a repeatable manner is limited by a finite repertoire of pre-evolved adaptive responses. Beyond this capacity, cells can use exploratory dynamics to cope with a…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
Due to inherent noise in intracellular networks cellular decisions can be random, so genetically identical cells can display different phenotypic behavior even in identical environments. Most previous work in understanding the…
In this work we develop a microscopic physical model of early evolution, where phenotype,organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype, the stability of its proteins in their native conformations which can be determined exactly…
We provide evidence of an extreme form of sensitivity to initial conditions in a family of one-dimensional self-ruling dynamical systems. We prove that some hyperchaotic sequences are closed-form expressions of the orbits of these…
An important question in biology is how the relative size of different organs is kept nearly constant during growth of an animal. This property, called proportionate growth, has received increased attention in recent years. We discuss our…
Recently, we developed a theory of a geometrically growing system. Here we show that the theory can explain some phenomena of power-law distribution including classical demographic and economic and novel pandemic instances, without…
Clusters appear in nature in a diversity of contexts, involving distances as long as the cosmological ones, and down to atoms and molecules and the very small nuclear size. They also appear in several other scenarios, in particular in…
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…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying…
Noise is a ubiquitous feature of the physical world. As a result, the first prerequisite of life is fault tolerance: maintaining integrity of state despite external bombardment. Recent experimental advances have revealed that biological…
The evolutionary transition to multicellularity transformed life on earth, allowing for the evolution of large, complex organisms. While multicellularity can be strongly advantageous, its earliest stages bring unique physical challenges.…
During developmental processes such as embryogenesis, how a group of cells fold into specific structures, is a central question in biology that defines how living organisms form. Establishing tissue-level morphology critically relies on how…
Background: Duplication of genes is important for evolution of molecular networks. Many authors have therefore considered gene duplication as a driving force in shaping the topology of molecular networks. In particular it has been noted…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
Embryonic development relies on the formation of sharp, precise gene expression boundaries. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, boundary formation has been proposed to occur at a dynamical critical point. Yet, in the paradigmatic case…
In this short communication, we shall explore a nonlinear discrete dynamical system that naturally occurs in population systems to describe a transmission of a trait from parents to their offspring. We consider a Mendelian inheritance for a…
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…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…