Related papers: Senescence Can Explain Microbial Persistence
Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…
We introduce and analyze several aspects of a new model for cell differentiation. It assumes that differentiation of progenitor cells is a continuous process. From the mathematical point of view, it is based on partial differential…
The evolution and emergence of antibiotic resistance is a major public health concern. The understanding of the within-host microbial dynamics combining mutational processes, horizontal gene transfer and resource consumption, is one of the…
We study the ability to maintain information in a population of reacting polymers under the influence of decay, i.e., spontaneous breakdown of large polymers. At a certain decay rate, it becomes impossible to maintain a significant…
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…
The paper is devoted to the study of the asymptotic behaviour of Moran process in random environment, say random selection. In finite population, the Moran process may be degenerate in finite time, thus we will study its limiting process in…
We describe a percolation-type approach to modeling of the processes of aging and certain other properties of tissues analyzed as systems consisting of interacting cells. Tissues are considered as structures made of regular healthy,…
The paper discusses a connection between asymmetric reproduction -- that is reproduction in a parent-child relationship where the parent does not mutate during reproduction --, the fact that all non-viral lifeforms bear genes of their…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Genes are not located randomly along genomes. Synteny, the conservation of their relative positions in genomes of different species, reflects fundamental constraints on natural evolution. We present approaches to infer pairs of co-localized…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
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…
Disgust is a basic emotion that serves to avoid contaminants, and is central to the behavioural immune system. While disgust-motivated avoidance occurs in bonobos and chimpanzees, humans show uniquely high levels of contamination…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
Motivated by recent research of aging in E. coli, we explore the effects of aging on bacterial fitness. The disposable soma theory of aging was developed to explain how differences in lifespans and aging rates could be linked to life…
We present a novel model that describes the within-host evolutionary dynamics of parasites undergoing antigenic variation. The approach uses a multi-type branching process with two types of entities defined according to their relationship…
To maintain a constant cell size, dividing cells have to coordinate cell cycle events with cell growth. This coordination has for long been supposed to rely on the existence of size thresholds determining cell cycle progression [1]. In…
The field of active matter explores the behaviors of self propelled agents out of equilibrium, with active suspensions, such as swimming bacteria in solutions, serving as impactful models. These systems exhibit spatio-temporal patterns akin…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…