Related papers: Stochastic gene expression in switching environmen…
The unwelcome evolution of malignancy during cancer progression emerges through a selection process in a complex heterogeneous population structure. In the present work, we investigate evolutionary dynamics in a phenotypically heterogeneous…
Understanding how stochastic and non-linear deterministic processes interact is a major challenge in population dynamics theory. After a short review, we introduce a stochastic individual-centered particle model to describe the evolution in…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
The effect of stochasticity, in the form of Gaussian white noise, in a predator-prey model with two distinct time-scales is presented. A supercritical singular Hopf bifurcation yields a Type II excitability in the deterministic model. We…
Adaptive control in biological systems, such as intestinal immunity, remains poorly understood despite detailed knowledge of underlying regulatory networks. We propose an alternative framework based on stochastic martingale turnover, in…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Transposable elements, or transposons, are DNA sequences that can jump from site to site in the genome during the life cycle of a cell, usually encoding the very enzymes which perform their excision. However, some transposons are parasitic,…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
The dynamical organization of membrane-bound organelles along intracellular transport pathways relies on vesicular exchange between organelles and on biochemical maturation of the organelle content by specific enzymes. The relative…
Due to inherent noise in intracellular networks cellular decisions can be random, so genetically identical cells can display different phenotypic behavior even in identical environments. Most previous work in understanding the…
A fundamental feature of collective cell migration is phenotypic heterogeneity which, for example, influences tumour progression and relapse. While current mathematical models often consider discrete phenotypic structuring of the cell…
We are interested in modeling some two-level population dynamics, resulting from the interplay of ecological interactions and phenotypic variation of individuals (or hosts) and the evolution of cells (or parasites) of two types living in…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
A toggle switch consists of two genes that mutually repress each other. This regulatory motif is active during cell differentiation and is thought to act as a memory device, being able to choose and maintain cell fate decisions. In this…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…
Discrete-state stochastic models are a popular approach to describe the inherent stochasticity of gene expression in single cells. The analysis of such models is hindered by the fact that the underlying discrete state space is extremely…
Replication of genetic material is an important process for all living organisms. Origins of replication initiate the copying of DNA at many points on a chromosome, and it is the distribution of these points that is relevant here, as it…
Recent evidence suggests that nongenetic (epigenetic) mechanisms play an important role at all stages of cancer evolution. In many cancers, these mechanisms have been observed to induce dynamic switching between two or more cell states,…
The goal of this article is to contribute towards the conceptual and quantitative understanding of the evolutionary benefits for (microbial) populations to maintain a seed bank (consisting of dormant individuals) when facing fluctuating…
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…