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Nadya Morozova

Publications and source records attributed to Nadya Morozova.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Inference on tissue transplantation experiments

We review studies on tissue transplantation experiments for various species: one piece of the donor tissue is excised and transplanted into a slit in the host tissue, then observe the behavior of this grafted tissue. Although we have known the results of some transplantation experiments, there are many more possible experiments with unknown results. We develop a penalty function-based method that uses the known experimental results to infer the unknown experimental results. Similar experiments without similar results get penalized and correspond to smaller probability. This method can provide the most probable results of a group of experiments or the probability of a specific result for each experiment. This method is also generalized to other situations. Besides, we solve a problem: how to design experiments so that such a method can be applied most efficiently.

q-bio.QM

Basic, simple and extendable kinetic model of protein synthesis

Protein synthesis is one of the most fundamental biological processes, which consumes a significant amount of cellular resources. Despite existence of multiple mathematical models of translation, varying in the level of mechanistical details, surprisingly, there is no basic and simple chemical kinetic model of this process, derived directly from the detailed kinetic model. One of the reasons for this is that the translation process is characterized by indefinite number of states, thanks to existence of polysomes. We bypass this difficulty by applying a trick consisting in lumping multiple states of translated mRNA into few dynamical variables and by introducing a variable describing the pool of translating ribosomes. The simplest model can be solved analytically under some assumptions. The basic and simple model can be extended, if necessary, to take into account various phenomena such as the interaction between translating ribosomes, limited amount of ribosomal units or regulation of translation by microRNA. The model can be used as a building block (translation module) for more complex models of cellular processes. We demonstrate the utility of the model in two examples. First, we determine the critical parameters of the single protein synthesis for the case when the ribosomal units are abundant. Second, we demonstrate intrinsic bi-stability in the dynamics of the ribosomal protein turnover and predict that a minimal number of ribosomes should pre-exists in a living cell to sustain its protein synthesis machinery, even in the absence of proliferation.

q-bio.MN

Theory of Morphogenesis

A model of morphogenesis is proposed based on seven explicit postulates. The mathematical import and biological significance of the postulates are explored and discussed.

q-bio.QM

Geometry of Morphogenesis

We introduce a formalism for the geometry of eukaryotic cells and organisms.Cells are taken to be star-convex with good biological reason. This allows for a convenient description of their extent in space as well as all manner of cell surface gradients. We assume that a spectrum of such cell surface markers determines an epigenetic code for organism shape. The union of cells in space at a moment in time is by definition the organism taken as a metric subspace of Euclidean space, which can be further equipped with an arbitrary measure. Each cell determines a point in space thus assigning a finite configuration of distinct points in space to an organism, and a bundle over this configuration space is introduced with fiber a Hilbert space recording specific epigenetic data. On this bundle, a Lagrangian formulation of morphogenetic dynamics is proposed based on Gromov-Hausdorff distance which at once describes both embryo development and regenerative growth.

q-bio.OT

The Geometry of Morphogenesis and the Morphogenetic Field Concept

The process of morphogenesis, which can be defined as an evolution of the form of an organism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries in the life sciences. It is clear, that gene expression patterns cannot explain the development of the precise geometry of an organism and its parts in space. Here, we suggest a set of postulates and possible approaches for discovering the correspondence between molecular biological information and its realization in a given geometry of an organism in space-time. First, we suggest that the geometry of the organism and its parts is coded by a molecular code located on the cell surfaces in such a way that, with each cell, there can be associated a corresponding matrix, containing this code. As a particular model, we propose coding by several types of oligosaccharide residues of glycoconjugates. Second, we provide a notion of cell event, and suggest a description of development as a tree of cell events, where under cell event we understand the changing of cell state, e.g. the processes of cell division, cell growth/death, shift or differentiation. Next we suggest describing these cell motion laws using the notion of a "morphogenetic field", meaning by the field an object in an "event space" over a "cell space", which govern the transformation of the coded biological information into an instructive signal for a cell event for a given cell, depending on the position of a cell in the developing embryo. The matrix on a cell surface will be changed after each cell event according to the rule(s) dictated by the morphogenetic field of an organism. Finally, we provide some ideas on the connection between morphogenetic code on a cell surface, cell motion law(s) and the geometry of an embryo.

q-bio.OT

Dynamical modeling of microRNA action on the protein translation process

Protein translation is a multistep process which can be represented as a cascade of biochemical reactions (initiation, ribosome assembly, elongation, etc.), the rate of which can be regulated by small non-coding microRNAs through multiple mechanisms. It remains unclear what mechanisms of microRNA action are most dominant: moreover, many experimental reports deliver controversal messages on what is the concrete mechanism actually observed in the experiment. Parker and Nissan (Parker and Nissan, RNA, 2008) demonstrated that it is impossible to distinguish alternative biological hypotheses using the steady state data on the rate of protein synthesis. For their analysis they used two simple kinetic models of protein translation. In contrary, we show that dynamical data allow to discriminate some of the mechanisms of microRNA action. We demonstrate this using the same models as in (Parker and Nissan, RNA, 2008) for the sake of comparison but the methods developed (asymptotology of biochemical networks) can be used for other models. As one of the results of our analysis, we formulate a hypothesis that the effect of microRNA action is measurable and observable only if it affects the dominant system (generalization of the limiting step notion for complex networks) of the protein translation machinery. The dominant system can vary in different experimental conditions that can partially explain the existing controversy of some of the experimental data.

q-bio.MN