Related papers: Critically assessing atavism, an evolution-centere…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
Cancer results from a sequence of genetic and epigenetic changes which lead to a variety of abnormal phenotypes including increased proliferation and survival of somatic cells, and thus, to a selective advantage of pre-cancerous cells. The…
As the past decade barely dawned, a fundamentally novel view of cancer relating to signal transduction through intracellular hormones/growth factors and their subunits began to unfold. Further along, it gained additional substance with the…
A small but growing number of people are finding interesting parallels between ecosystems as studied by ecologists (think of a Savanna or the Amazon rain forest or a Coral reef) and tumours1-3. The idea of viewing cancer from an ecological…
The cellular phenotype is described by a complex network of molecular interactions. Elucidating network properties that distinguish disease from the healthy cellular state is therefore of critical importance for gaining systems-level…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
Adaptive therapy (AT) is designed to postpone the emergence of drug resistance by exploiting evolutionary competition among tumor subclones. Most mathematical models of AT assume a binary population structure of drug-sensitive and…
We propose an extension of a standard stochastic individual-based model in population dynamics which broadens the range of biological applications. Our primary motivation is modelling of immunotherapy of malignant tumours. In this context…
Evolution is often understood through genetic mutations driving changes in an organism's fitness, but there is potential to extend this understanding beyond the genetic code. We propose that natural products - complex molecules central to…
Cancer progresses with a change in the structure of the gene network in normal cells. We define a measure of organizational hierarchy in gene networks of affected cells in adult acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients. With a retrospective…
Glucose is a primary energy source for cancer cells. Several lines of evidence support the idea that monocarboxylate transporters, such as MCT1, elicit metabolic reprogramming of cancer cells in glucose-poor environments, allowing them to…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
Cancer is a complex disease and thus is complicated to model. However, simple models that describe the main processes involved in tumoral dynamics, e.g., competition and mutation, can give us clues about cancer behaviour, at least…
Comparative studies of cancer-related genes allow us to gain novel information about the evolution and function of these genes, but also to understand cancer as a driving force in biological systems and species life histories. So far,…
Biological evolution continuously refines the design of species, resulting in highly optimised organisms over hundreds of millennia. Intuitively, we expect that random changes-evolution's primary mechanism-are more likely to be harmful than…
We calculate measures of hierarchy in gene and tissue networks of breast cancer patients. We find that the likelihood of metastasis in the future is correlated with increased values of network hierarchy for expression networks of…
Mutations can arise from the chance misincorporation of nucleotides during DNA replication or from DNA lesions that are not repaired correctly. We introduce a model that relates the source of mutations to their accumulation with cell…
The vast amount of sequencing data presently available allow the scientific community to explore a range of genetic variables that may drive and progress cancer. A myriad of predictive tools has been proposed, allowing researchers and…
Cancer progression is driven by a small number of genetic alterations accumulating in a neoplasm. These few driver alterations reside in a cancer genome alongside tens of thousands of other mutations that are widely believed to have no role…
Recent progress in microdissection and in DNA sequencing has enabled subsampling of multi-focal cancers in organs such as the liver in several hundred spots, helping to determine the pattern of mutations in each of these spots. This has led…