Related papers: Simple biological controllers drive the evolution …
Homeostasis is concerned with regulatory mechanisms, present in biological systems, where some specific variable is kept close to a set value as some external disturbance affects the system. Mathematically, the notion of homeostasis can be…
We propose a minimal model to simulate long waiting times followed by evolutionary bursts on rugged landscapes. It combines point and inversions-like mutations as sources of genetic variation. The inversions are intended to simulate one of…
This paper presents a real-time simulation involving ''protozoan-like'' cells that evolve by natural selection in a physical 2D ecosystem. Selection pressure is exerted via the requirements to collect mass and energy from the surroundings…
This piece serves two purposes. Firstly, it aims at elucidating the role of epistasis in shaping, at a molecular level, the evolutionary paths of proteins, as well as the extent to which these epistatic effects are the outcome of an…
The dynamical characterization of proteins is crucial to understand protein function. From a microscopic point of view, protein dynamics is governed by the local atomic interactions that, in turn, trigger the functional conformational…
When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…
Noisy fluctuations are ubiquitous in complex systems. They play a crucial or delicate role in the dynamical evolution of gene regulation, signal transduction, biochemical reactions, among other systems. Therefore, it is essential to…
Low-dimensional yet rich dynamics often emerge in the brain. Examples include oscillations and chaotic dynamics during sleep, epilepsy, and voluntary movement. However, a general mechanism for the emergence of low dimensional dynamics…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
The co-optimization of a robot's body and brain presents a coupled challenge: the morphology constrains which control strategies are effective, while the control determines how well the morphology performs. To address this, we combine…
Multidimensional systems coupled via complex networks are widespread in nature and thus frequently invoked for a large plethora of interesting applications. From ecology to physics, individual entities in mutual interactions are grouped in…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
We investigate the long time behavior of a passive particle evolving in a one-dimensional diffusive random environment, with diffusion constant $D$. We consider two cases: (a) The particle is pulled forward by a small external constant…
Gene products (RNAs, proteins) often occur at low molecular counts inside individual cells, and hence are subject to considerable random fluctuations (noise) in copy number over time. Not surprisingly, cells encode diverse regulatory…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
Many complex systems satisfy a set of constraints on their degrees of freedom, and at the same time, they are able to work and adapt to different conditions. Here, we describe the emergence of this ability in a simplified model in which the…
In view of ever-changing conditions both in the external world and in intrinsic brain states, maintaining the robustness of computations poses a challenge, adequate solutions to which we are only beginning to understand. At the level of…
This paper considers the optimization landscape of linear dynamic output feedback control with $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ robustness constraints. We consider the feasible set of all the stabilizing full-order dynamical controllers that satisfy an…