Related papers: Phase transitions in microbial lineage trees
Native membranes of biological cells display melting transitions of their lipids at a temperature of 10-20 degrees below body temperature. Such transitions can be observed in various bacterial cells, in nerves, in cancer cells, but also in…
We study a mechanism for reliable switching in biomolecular signal-transduction cascades. Steady bistable states are created by system-size cooperative effects in populations of proteins, in spite of the fact that the phosphorylation-state…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
We study an active random walker model in which a particle's motion is determined by a self-generated field. The field encodes information about the particle's path history. This leads to either self-attractive or self-repelling behavior.…
We propose a general theory for surface patterning in many different biological systems, including mite and insect cuticles, pollen grains, fungal spores, and insect eggs. The patterns of interest are often intricate and diverse, yet an…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
Previous study of properties of the first-order phase transition in a set of plasma mod-els with common feature - absence of individual correlations between charges of opposite sign, was continued. Predicted discontinuities in equilibrium…
We introduce a population dynamics model, where individual genomes are represented by bit-strings. Selection is described by death probabilities which depend on these genomes, and new individuals continuously replace the ones that die,…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
In this paper we present a hydrodynamic approach to describe the motion of migrating bacteria as a special class of self-propelled systems. Analytical and numerical calculations has been performed to study the behavior of our model in the…
Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Here we develop a general approach to modeling heterogeneous populations with discrete…
We investigate the macroscopic effects of the ingredients that drive the origin of species through sympatric speciation. In our model, sympatric speciation is obtained as we tune up the strength of competition between individuals with…
We consider a system of clusters made of elementary building blocks, monomers, and evolving via collisions between diffusing monomers and immobile composite clusters. In our model, the cluster-monomer collision can lead to the attachment of…
The question of a phase transition in exiting the Planck epoch of the early universe is addressed. An order parameter is proposed to help decide the issue, and estimates are made concerning its behavior. Our analysis is suggestive that a…
The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is triggered within freely growing bacterial…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
The dynamics of phase transitions plays a crucial r\^ole in the so-called interface between high energy particle physics and cosmology. Many of the interesting results generated during the last fifteen years or so rely on simplified…
Often sharp changes in cellular behavior are triggered by thresholded events, i.e., by the attainment of a threshold value of a relevant cellular or molecular dynamical variable. Since the governing variable itself typically undergoes noisy…
We apply the theory of markov random fields on trees to derive a phase transition in the number of samples needed in order to reconstruct phylogenies. We consider the Cavender-Farris-Neyman model of evolution on trees, where all the inner…
We provide information about the asymptotic regimes for a homogeneous fragmentation of a finite set. We establish a phase transition for the asymptotic behaviours of the shattering times, defined as the first instants when all the blocks of…