Related papers: Multistable protocells can aid the evolution of pr…
Fluctuating environments pose tremendous challenges to bacterial populations. It is observed in numerous bacterial species that individual cells can stochastically switch among multiple phenotypes for the population to survive in rapidly…
Metastability is observed when a physical system is close to a first order phase transition. In this paper the metastable behavior of a two state reversible probabilistic cellular automaton with self-interaction is discussed. Depending on…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. First, we introduce a new theoretical framework, reaction-diffusion system on `chemical species…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
Population dynamics and in particular microbial population dynamics, though they are complex but also intrinsically discrete and random, are conventionally represented as deterministic differential equations systems. We propose to revisit…
We provide a non-equilibrium thermodynamic description of the life-cycle of a droplet based, chemically feasible, system of protocells. By coupling the protocells metabolic kinetics with its thermodynamics, we demonstrate how the system can…
The study of biological cells in terms of mesoscopic, nonequilibrium, nonlinear, stochastic dynamics of open chemical systems provides a paradigm for other complex, self-organizing systems with ultra-fast stochastic fluctuations, short-time…
We study a model for the evolution of chemical species under a combination of population dynamics on a short time scale and a selection mechanism on a longer time scale. Least fit nodes are replaced by new nodes whose links are attached to…
Heterogeneity in gene expression across isogenic cell populations can give rise to phenotypic diversity, even when cells are in homogenous environments. This diversity arises from the discrete, stochastic nature of biochemical reactions,…
The homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
Clonal interference, competition between multiple co-occurring beneficial mutations, has a major role in adaptation of asexual populations. We provide a simple individual based stochastic model of clonal interference taking into account a…
A key goal of systems biology is the predictive mathematical description of gene regulatory circuits. Different approaches are used such as deterministic and stochastic models, models that describe cell growth and division explicitly or…
Background: Autocatalytic sets are often considered a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the origin and early evolution of life. Although the idea of autocatalytic sets was already conceived of many years ago, only recently have…
Genetic switch systems with mutual repression of two transcription factors are studied using deterministic methods (rate equations) and stochastic methods (the master equation and Monte Carlo simulations). These systems exhibit bistability,…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
The building of minimal self-reproducing systems with a physical embodiment (generically called protocells) is a great challenge, with implications for both theory and applied sciences. Although the classical view of a living protocell…
Cellular differentiation and evolution are stochastic processes that can involve multiple types (or states) of particles moving on a complex, high-dimensional state-space or "fitness" landscape. Cells of each specific type can thus be…
A toggle switch consists of two genes that mutually repress each other. This regulatory motif is active during cell differentiation and is thought to act as a memory device, being able to choose and maintain cell fate decisions. In this…
Based on extensive study of a dynamical systems model of the development of a cell society, a novel theory for stem cell differentiation and its regulation is proposed as the ``chaos hypothesis''. Two fundamental features of stem cell…
Adaptation mechanism of cells on the basis of stochastic gene expression and epigenetic modification is proposed. From marginally stable states generated by epigenetic modification, a gene expression pattern that achieves greater cell…