Big data can be analyzed in many different ways, depending on the scientific questions that need to be answered. Bioinformatics and computational biology are relatively more common terms for data analysis methods that borrow heavily from the fields of math and computer science. In this blog post I discuss the utility of mathematical biology methods. What […]
PLOS One. Endoreduplicated cells grow in size as their DNA content increases. The distribution of size was observed to be Poisson. This allowed the authors to create a mathematical model with a single parameter which describes the probability of exiting endoreduplication. The model recovers cell size distributions observed in Arabidopsis. PLOS One 10.1371/journal.pone.0185050
PLOS One. Plant stomatal opening is controlled by phytohormones, among other factors. This article models the phytohormone signaling response in guard cells using ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Sixteen components in this system were analyzed by constructing 16 different models and determining the ability of these models to recover previous findings. The resulting best model showed […]
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. GENIST (gene regulatory network inference from spatiotemporal data) is a new algorithm developed by de Luis Balaguer et al to predict new gene interactions and transcriptional regulators (available at https://github.com/madeluis/GENIST). The algorithm combines inference of a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) and clustering using principal component analysis (PCA) using spatial and […]
PLOS Biol. This article describes a stochastic mathematical model of the stomatal closure network responding to abscisic acid (ABA). The Boolean network is constructed from a comprehensive literature review of the components’ dependencies. The model’s predictions agree with experimental data 90% of the time, and provides predictions in 85 additional cases. The code is available […]
Sci Reports. Both starch degradation and accumulating sucrose levels are related to the circadian cycle, although it is unknown which is the primary regulator. The authors created a mathematical model wherein the circadian oscillator responds to sucrose. The model predictions were experimentally validated using a sugar-insensitive mutant (ppr7-11). Sci Reports. 10.1038/s41598-017-08325-y
Front. Genetics. In this paper, the authors model the metabolism in Arabidopsis using Petri nets (PN). PNs are dynamic models that use “tokens” to represent movement between the places and edges of the model, representing the products of a reaction. The model was simplified using reduction techniques, and divided into four subnetworks: sucrose, citrate, UTP, […]
Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA. Xanthophylls zeaxanthin and lutein are involved in the nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ) pathway which is triggered in response to excess photons. The roles of zeaxanthin and lutein in NPQ are studied using mathematical models and Arabidopsis mutants. The authors hope that future refinement of the model will provide a prediction of […]
This week’s papers were seleted by Renee Dale. Renee is a PhD student in biology and an MS student in statistics at Loiusiana State University who is studying mathematical biology and biostatistics for plant biology applications. She is also working on an educational video game! Renee selected these papers to draw attention to the application […]