Related papers: Origin of genetic information from minority contro…
At an early stage in pre-biotic evolution, groups of replicating molecules must coordinate their reproduction to form aggregated units of selection. Mechanisms that enable this to occur are currently not well understood. In this paper we…
Compartments are ubiquitous throughout biology, yet their importance stretches back to the origin of cells. In the context of origin of life, we assume that a protocell, a compartment enclosing functional components, requires $N$ components…
Gene expression is inherently noisy as many steps in the read-out of the genetic information are stochastic. To disentangle the effect of different sources of stochasticity in such systems, we consider various models that describe some…
In multicellular organisms, several cell states coexist. For determining each cell type, cell-cell interactions are often essential, in addition to intracellular gene expression dynamics. Based on dynamical systems theory, we propose a…
It has been pointed out that if an autocatalytic cycle produces primitive membrane chemicals, it can compose a self-maintaining proto cell. Moreover, it is known that a proto cell can divide itself spontaneously as it grows. An unsolved…
In higher organisms, all cells share the same genome, but every cell expresses only a limited and specific set of genes that defines the cell type. During cell division, not only the genome, but also the cell type is inherited by the…
A review of the mechanisms of speciation is performed. The mechanisms of the evolution of species, taking into account the feedback of the state of the environment and mechanisms of the emergence of complexity, are considered. It is shown…
We present a simple mathematical model that captures the evolutionary capabilities of a prebiotic compartment or protocell. In the model the protocell contains an autocatalytic set whose chemical dynamics is coupled to the growth-division…
Changes in a cell's external or internal conditions are usually reflected in the concentrations of the relevant transcription factors. These proteins in turn modulate the expression levels of the genes under their control and sometimes need…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
The methylation of DNA regulates gene expression. On cell division the methylation state of the DNA is typically inherited from parent to daughter cells. While the chemical bond between the methyl group and the DNA is very strong, changes…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
The problem of unicellular-multicellular transition is one of the main issues that is discussing in evolutionary biology. In [1] the fitness of a colony of cells is considered in terms of its two basic components, viability and fecundity.…
The evolution of complex cellular life involved two major transitions: the encapsulation of self-replicating genetic entities into cellular units and the aggregation of individual genes into a collectively replicating genome. In this paper,…
Stem cells are characterized by their ability to self-renew, as well as to differentiate and give rise to new populations of cells. Stem cell divisions are crucial for generative processes that occur during early development, and later in…
A central challenge in the origin of life is understanding how catalytic peptide-like polymers and information-bearing nucleic acid-like polymers emerged as an interde-pendent system. This study constructs a primordial cognitive model…
In this work we develop a microscopic physical model of early evolution, where phenotype,organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype, the stability of its proteins in their native conformations which can be determined exactly…
Evolution of genetic code is studied as the change in the choice of enzymes that are used to synthesize amino acids from the genetic information of nucleic acids. We propose the following theory: the differentiation of physiological states…
Natural selection can create information. In particular, because of the action of natural selection, we can often learn something about an environment by examining local organisms, and vice versa. For example, the characteristics of a…