Related papers: Simple biological controllers drive the evolution …

Evolving systems, be it an antibody repertoire in the face of mutating pathogens or a microbial population exposed to varied antibiotics, constantly search for adaptive solutions in time-varying fitness landscapes. Generalists correspond to…

Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity - the near decomposability of the…

Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…

The possibility of complicated dynamic behaviour driven by non-linear feedbacks in dynamical systems has revolutionized science in the latter part of the last century. Yet despite examples of complicated frequency dynamics, the possibility…

This work explores the trade-off between the number of samples required to accurately build models of dynamical systems and the degradation of performance in various control objectives due to a coarse approximation. In particular, we show…

The effect caused by the presence of a number of distinct time scales in a simple stochastic model for the Earth's atmosphere temperature fluctuations is studied. The model is described by a dissipative dynamics consisting of a set of…

One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…

Coupling the control of expression stochasticity (noise) to the ability of expression change (plasticity) can alter gene function and influence adaptation. A number of factors, such as transcription re-initiation, strong chromatin…

Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…

We employ molecular dynamics simulations to explore how internal flexibility affects phase transitions in soft-matter systems composed of dimers interacting via a core-softened potential with two characteristic length scales. Monomers are…

The functioning of a living cell is largely determined by the structure of its regulatory network, comprising non-linear interactions between regulatory genes. An important factor for the stability and evolvability of such regulatory…

Flutter in lightweight airfoils under unsteady flows presents a critical challenge in aeroelastic stability and control. This study uncovers phase-localized mechanisms that drive the onset and suppression of flutter in a freely pitching…

We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical dynamical systems that generate…

Gene regulatory networks typically have low in-degrees, whereby any given gene is regulated by few of the genes in the network. They also tend to have broad distributions for the out-degree. What mechanisms might be responsible for these…

Robust control theory studies the effect of noise, disturbances, and other uncertainty on system performance. Despite growing recognition across science and engineering that robustness and efficiency tradeoffs dominate the evolution and…

Multiple organs in a living system respond to environmental changes, and the signals from the organs regulate the physiological environment. Inspired by this biological feedback, we propose a simple autonomous system of active rotators to…

Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…

Tissue homeostasis, the biological process of maintaining a steady state in tissue via control of cell proliferation, death, and metabolic function, is essential for the development, growth, maintenance, and proper function of living…

Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…

The interaction between natural selection and random mutation is frequently debated in recent years. Does similar dilemma also exist in the evolution of real networks such as biological networks? In this paper, we try to discuss this issue…