Related papers: Robustness and Evolvability of the B Cell Mutator …
We study the maturation of the antibody population following primary antigen presentation as a global optimization problem. Emphasis is placed on the trade-off between the safety of mutations that lead to local improvements to the…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
The mammalian adaptive immune system has evolved over millions of years to become an incredibly effective defense against foreign antigens. The adaptive immune system's humoral response creates plasma B cells and memory B cells, each with…
Robustness and evolvability are essential properties to the evolution of biological networks. To determine if a biological network is robust and/or evolvable, it is required to compare its functions before and after mutations. However, this…
The antibody repertoire of each individual is continuously updated by the evolutionary process of B cell receptor mutation and selection. It has recently become possible to gain detailed information concerning this process through…
A persistent public health challenge is finding immunization schemes that are effective in combating highly mutable pathogens such as HIV and influenza viruses. To address this, we analyze a simplified model of affinity maturation, the…
In order to target threatening pathogens, the adaptive immune system performs a continuous reorganization of its lymphocyte repertoire. Following an immune challenge, the B cell repertoire can evolve cells of increased specificity for the…
The population dynamics theory of B cells in a typical germinal center could play an important role in revealing how affinity maturation is achieved. However, the existing models encountered some conflicts with experiments. To resolve 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…
The design space of networked embedded systems is very large, posing challenges to the optimisation of such platforms when it comes to support applications with real-time guarantees. Recent research has shown that a number of inter-related…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
We analyze the interactions between division, mutation and selection in a simplified evolutionary model, assuming that the population observed can be classified into fitness levels. The construction of our mathematical framework is…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
Recent advances in diffusion models have shown remarkable potential for antibody design, yet existing approaches apply uniform generation strategies that cannot adapt to each antigen's unique requirements. Inspired by B cell affinity…
Understanding how systems can be designed to be evolvable is fundamental to research in optimization, evolution, and complex systems science. Many researchers have thus recognized the importance of evolvability, i.e. the ability to find new…
Temporal evolution of a clonal bacterial population is modelled taking into account reversible mutation and selection mechanisms. For the mutation model, an efficient algorithm is proposed to verify whether experimental data can be…
Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait subject to…
The role of historical contingency in the origin of life is one of the great unknowns in modern science. Only one example of life exists--one that proceeded from a single self-replicating organism (or a set of replicating hyper-cycles) to…
The ability to absorb mutations while retaining structure and function, or mutational robustness, is a remarkable property of natural proteins. In this Letter, we use a computational model of organismic evolution [Zeldovich et al, PLOS Comp…
Designing evolutionary algorithms capable of uncovering highly evolvable representations is an open challenge; such evolvability is important because it accelerates evolution and enables fast adaptation to changing circumstances. This paper…