Related papers: Adaptive efficiency of information processing in i…

The repertoire of lymphocyte receptors in the adaptive immune system protects organisms from diverse pathogens. A well-adapted repertoire should be tuned to the pathogenic environment to reduce the cost of infections. We develop a general…

Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…

We model the evolution of the Internet at the Autonomous System level as a process of competition for users and adaptation of bandwidth capability. We find the exponent of the degree distribution as a simple function of the growth rates of…

The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…

Zoonotic pathogens represent a growing global risk, yet the speed of adaptive immune activation across mammalian species remains poorly understood. Despite orders-of-magnitude differences in size and metabolic rate, we show that the time to…

Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…

An important feature of many complex systems, both natural and artificial, is the structure and organization of their interaction networks with interesting properties. Here we present a theory of self-organization by evolutionary adaptation…

In a co-evolutionary context, the survive probability of individual elements of a system depends on their relation with their neighbors. The natural selection process depends on the whole population, which is determined by local events…

A fundamental question in the conjunction of information theory, biophysics, bioinformatics and thermodynamics relates to the principles and processes that guide the development of natural intelligence in natural environments where…

Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…

Based on a recent model of evolving viruses competing with an adapting immune system [1], we study the conditions under which a viral quasispecies can maximize its growth rate. The range of mutation rates that allows viruses to thrive is…

Cells are known to exert forces to sense their physical surroundings for guidance of motion and fate decisions. Here, we propose that cells might do mechanical work to drive their own evolution, taking inspiration from the adaptive immune…

Adaptation is used by biological sensory systems to respond to a wide range of environmental signals, by adapting their response properties to the statistics of the stimulus in order to maximize information transmission. We derive rules of…

We introduce an interacting particle system that models the spread of an epidemic in terms of heterogeneous diffusive dynamics, rather than exogenous contact and transmission rates at the population level as in classical compartmental…

The immune system can be thought as a complex network of different interacting elements. A cellular automaton, defined in shape-space, was recently shown to exhibit self-regulation and complex behavior and is, therefore, a good candidate to…

Different pathogens spreading in the same host population often generate complex co-circulation dynamics because of the many possible interactions between the pathogens and the host immune system, the host life cycle, and the space…

Human pathogens transmitted through environmental pathways are subject to stress and pressures outside of the host. These pressures may cause pathogen pathovars to diverge in their environmental persistence and their infectivity on an…

Predator-prey coevolution is commonly thought to result in reciprocal arms races that produce increasingly extreme and complex traits. However, such directional change is not inevitable. Here, we provide evidence for a previously…

Biological systems are modular, and this modularity affects the evolution of biological systems over time and in different environments. We here develop a theory for the dynamics of evolution in a rugged, modular fitness landscape. We show…

The ability of organisms to accurately sense their environment and respond accordingly is critical for evolutionary success. However, exactly how the sensory ability influences fitness is a topic of active research, while the necessity of a…