Related papers: Studying self-organisation across the biosphere wi…
Synthetic Biology is an interdisciplinary field that utilizes well-established engineering principles, ranging from electrical, control and computer systems, for analyzing the biological systems, such as biological circuits, enzymes,…
A hierarchical structure describing the inter-relationships of species has long been a fundamental concept in systematic biology, from Linnean classification through to the more recent quest for a 'Tree of Life.' In this paper we use an…
Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
Self-organisation is the spontaneous emergence of spatio-temporal structures and patterns from the interaction of smaller individual units. Examples are found across many scales in very different systems and scientific disciplines, from…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
A key feature of many developmental systems is their ability to self-organize spatial patterns of functionally distinct cell fates. To ensure proper biological function, such patterns must be established reproducibly, by controlling and…
Many real life networks present an average path length logarithmic with the number of nodes and a degree distribution which follows a power law. Often these networks have also a modular and self-similar structure and, in some cases -…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Our planet is roughly closed to matter, but open to energy input from the sun. However, to harness this energy, organisms must transform matter from one chemical (redox) state to another. For example, photosynthetic organisms can capture…
Metabolism is a fascinating cell machinery underlying life and disease and genome-scale reconstructions provide us with a captivating view of its complexity. However, deciphering the relationship between metabolic structure and function…
How self-organized networks develop, mature and degenerate is a key question for sociotechnical, cyberphysical and biological systems with potential applications from tackling violent extremism through to neurological diseases. So far, it…
Over the last decade, significant progress has been made in understanding complex biological systems, however there have been few attempts at incorporating this knowledge into nature inspired optimization algorithms. In this paper, we…
In the present monograph we formulate a simple model for heat transfer in living tissue with self - regulation. The initial point of the model is the governing equations describing heat transfer in living tissue at the mesoscopic level,…
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
The organism is a fundamental concept in biology. However there is no universally accepted, formal, and yet broadly applicable definition of what an organism is. Here we introduce a candidate definition. We adopt the view that the…
Integrative biological simulations have a varied and controversial history in the biological sciences. From computational models of organelles, cells, and simple organisms, to physiological models of tissues, organ systems, and ecosystems,…
The monography examines the problem of constructing a group of automorphisms of a graph. A graph automorphism is a mapping of a set of vertices onto itself that preserves adjacency. The set of such automorphisms forms a vertex group of a…