Related papers: Decoding the Architecture of Living Systems
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
It is notoriously difficult to predict the behaviour of a complex self-organizing system, where the interactions among dynamical units form a heterogeneous topology. Even if the dynamics of each microscopic unit is known, a real…
Most complex systems are nonlinear, relying on emergent behavior from interacting subsystems, often characterized by oscillatory dynamics. Collective oscillatory behavior is essential for the proper functioning of many real world systems.…
Living systems are maintained out-of-equilibrium by external driving forces. At stationarity, they exhibit emergent selection phenomena that break equilibrium symmetries and originate from the expansion of the accessible chemical space due…
Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…
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,…
Links in a practical network may have different functions, which makes the original network a combination of some functional subnetworks. Here, by a model of coupled oscillators, we investigate how such functional subnetworks are evolved…
At the heart of many contemporary theories of life is the concept of biological self-organisation: organisms have to continuously produce and maintain the conditions of their own existence in order to stay alive. The way in which these…
Living systems are hierarchical control systems that display a small world network structure, in which many smaller clusters are nested within fewer larger ones, producing a fractal-like structure with a power-law cluster size distribution…
Competitive exclusion, a key principle of ecology, can be generalized to understand many other complex systems. Individuals under surviving pressure tend to be different from others, and correlations among them change correspondingly to the…
A central feature of complex systems is the relevance and entanglement of different levels of description. For instance, the dynamics of ecosystems can be alternatively described in terms of large ecological processes and classes of…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
An explanatory model for the emergence of evolvable units must display emerging structures that (1) preserve themselves in time (2) self-reproduce and (3) tolerate a certain amount of variation when reproducing. To tackle this challenge,…
Cellular behavior is governed by gene regulatory processes that are intrinsically dynamic and nonlinear, and are subject to non-negligible amounts of random fluctuations. Such conditions are ubiquitous in physical systems, where they have…
Complex systems such as ecological communities and neuron networks are essential parts of our everyday lives. These systems are composed of units which interact through intricate networks. The ability to predict sudden changes in the…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
The functioning of many biochemical networks is often robust -- remarkably stable under changes in external conditions and internal reaction parameters. Much recent work on robustness and evolvability has focused on the structure of neutral…
Engineered systems are designed to deftly operate under predetermined conditions yet are notoriously fragile when unexpected perturbations arise. In contrast, biological systems operate in a highly flexible manner; learn quickly adequate…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…