Related papers: Population dynamics of multiple ecDNA types
We discuss the mathematical modelling of two of the main mechanisms which pushed forward the emergence of multicellularity: phenotype divergence in cell differentiation, and between-cell cooperation. In line with the atavistic theory of…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Cellular populations such as avascular tumors and microbial biofilms may "invade" or grow into surrounding populations. The invading population is often comprised of a heterogeneous mixture of cells with varying growth rates. The population…
Mechanics and biochemical signaling are both often deregulated in cancer, leading to cancer cell phenotypes that exhibit increased invasiveness, proliferation, and survival. The dynamics and interactions of cytoskeletal components control…
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations cause severe congenital diseases but may also be associated with healthy aging. MtDNA is stochastically replicated and degraded, and exists within organelles which undergo dynamic fusion and fission. The…
Collecting genomics data across multiple heterogeneous populations (e.g., across different cancer types) has the potential to improve our understanding of disease. Despite sequencing advances, though, resources often remain a constraint…
DNA Methylation has been the most extensively studied epigenetic mark. Usually a change in the genotype, DNA sequence, leads to a change in the phenotype, observable characteristics of the individual. But DNA methylation, which happens in…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
In multi-cellular organisms, cells differentiate into multiple types as they divide. States of these cell types, as well as their numbers, are known to be robust to external perturbations; as conceptualized by Waddington's epigenetic…
We consider an exponentially growing population of cells undergoing mutations and ask about the effect of reproductive fluctuations (genetic drift) on its long-term evolution. We combine first step analysis with the stochastic dynamics of a…
Cancer is viewed as a multistep process whereby a normal cell is transformed into a cancer cell through the acquisition of mutations. We reduce the complexities of cancer progression to a simple set of underlying rules that govern the…
The conventional cancer stem cell (CSC) theory indicates a hierarchy of CSCs and non-stem cancer cells (NSCCs), that is, CSCs can differentiate into NSCCs but not vice versa. However, an alternative paradigm of CSC theory with reversible…
Movement behavior of biological entities plays a crucial role in their destiny through regulating their intraspecific and interspecific interactions as well as their interaction with surrounding environment. In spite of various models for…
We give a very short introduction to discrete and continuum models for the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of cancer through two case studies: a model for the evolutionary dynamics of cancer cells under cytotoxic therapy and a model for…
Models of codon evolution are commonly used to identify positive selection. Positive selection is typically a heterogeneous process, i.e., it acts on some branches of the evolutionary tree and not others. Previous work on DNA models showed…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
Heterogeneity is ubiquitous in stem cells (SC), cancer cells (CS), and cancer stem cells (CSC). SC and CSC heterogeneity is manifested as diverse sub-populations with self-renewing and unique regeneration capacity. Moreover, the CSC progeny…
Genomic alterations lead to cancer complexity and form a major hurdle for a comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying oncogenesis. In this review, we describe the recent advances in studying cancer-associated genes…
We have extended our previously developed 3D multi-scale agent-based brain tumor model to simulate cancer heterogeneity and to analyze its impact across the scales of interest. While our algorithm continues to employ an epidermal growth…
Aberrantly regulated cell motility is a hallmark of cancer cells. A hybrid agent-based model has been developed to investigate the synergistic and antagonistic cell motility-impacting effects of three microenvironment variables…