Related papers: Simple biological controllers drive the evolution …
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
Bistable biological regulatory systems need to cope with stochastic noise to fine-tune their function close to bifurcation points. Here, we study stability properties of this regime in generic systems to demonstrate that cooperative…
The semi-automatic or automatic synthesis of robot controller software is both desirable and challenging. Synthesis of rather simple behaviors such as collision avoidance by applying artificial evolution has been shown multiple times.…
Homeostasis, broadly speaking, refers to the maintenance of a stable internal state when faced with external stimuli. Failure to manage these regulatory processes can lead to different diseases or death. Most physiologists and cell…
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
Noise is a ubiquitous feature of the physical world. As a result, the first prerequisite of life is fault tolerance: maintaining integrity of state despite external bombardment. Recent experimental advances have revealed that biological…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
A novel model of biological organisms is advanced, treating an organism as a self-consistent system subject to a pathogen flux. The principal novelty of the model is that it describes not some parts, but a biological organism as a whole.…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of…
This work introduces a data-driven control approach for stabilizing high-dimensional dynamical systems from scarce data. The proposed context-aware controller inference approach is based on the observation that controllers need to act…
Effective control of biological systems can often be achieved through the control of a surprisingly small number of distinct variables. We bring clarity to such results using the formalism of Boolean dynamical networks, analyzing the…
Synthetic biology is an interdisciplinary field aiming to design biochemical systems with desired behaviors. To this end, molecular controllers have been developed which, when embedded into a pre-existing ambient biochemical network,…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…
Constraints on changes in expression levels across all cell components imposed by the steady growth of cells have recently been discussed both experimentally and theoretically. By assuming a small environmental perturbation and considering…
Previous evolutionary studies demonstrated how evaluating evolving agents in variable environmental conditions enable them to develop solutions that are robust to environmental variation. We demonstrate how the robustness of the agents can…
Elucidating the architecture and dynamics of large scale genetic regulatory networks of cells is an important goal in systems biology. We study the system level dynamical properties of the genetic network of Escherichia coli that regulates…