Alessandro Fontana — Page 2

arXiv2009

Epigenetic Tracking: Towards a Project for an Artificial Biology

This paper deals with a model of cellular growth called "Epigenetic Tracking", whose key features are: i) distinction bewteen "normal" and "driver" cells; ii) presence in driver cells of an epigenetic memory, that holds the position of the cell in the driver cell lineage tree and represents the source of differentiation during development. In the first part of the paper the model is proved able to generate arbitrary target shapes of unmatched size and variety by means of evo-devo techniques, thus being validated as a model of embryogenesis and cellular differentiation. In the second part of the paper it is shown how the model can produce artificial counterparts for some key aspects of multicellular biology, such as junk DNA, ageing and carcinogenesis. If individually each of these topics has been the subject of intense investigation and modelling effort, to our knowledge no single model or theory seeking to cover all of them under a unified framework has been put forward as yet: this work contains such a theory, which makes Epigenetic Tracking a potential basis for a project of Artificial Biology.

q-bio.CB↗

arXiv2008

Epigenetic Tracking, a Method to Generate Arbitrary Shapes By Using Evolutionary-Developmental Techniques

This paper describes an Artificial Embryology method (called ``Epigenetic Tracking'') to generate predefined arbitrarily shaped 2-dimensional arrays of cells by means of evolutionary techniques. It is based on a model of development, whose key features are: i) the distinction bewteen ``normal'' and ``driver'' cells, being the latter able to receive guidance from the genome, ii) the implementation of the proliferation/apoptosis events in such a way that many cells are created/deleted at once, in order to speed-up the morphogenetic process. iii) the presence in driver cells of an epigenetic memory, that holds the position of the cell in the cell lineage tree and represents the source of differentiation during development. The experiments performed with a number of 100x100 black and white and colour target shapes (the horse, the couple, the hand, the dolphin, the map of Britain, the foot, the frog, the baby, the stomach, the french flag, the head) bring to the conclusion that the method described is able to generate any target shape, outperforming any other known method in terms of size and variety of the generated shapes. The interpretation of the proposed method as a model of embryogenesis and its biological implications are discussed.

nlin.AO↗