2025/11/11 by Connor McShaffrey, McShaffrey, Connor, Eran Agmon +3 · 2 voices
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Mathematics · #Cell Behavior (q-bio.CB) #Dynamical Systems (math.DS) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Gene Regulatory Network Analysis #Mathematical Biology Tumor Growth #Planarian Biology and Electrostimulation #math.DS #q-bio.CB
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.07847
openalex publication_date 2025/11/11 · arxiv published 2025/11/11 · arxiv updated 2025/11/11 · openalex created_date 2025/11/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Nearly all cell models explicitly or implicitly deal with the biophysical constraints that must be respected for life to persist. Despite this, there is almost no systematicity in how these constraints are implemented, and we lack a principled understanding of how cellular dynamics interact with them and how they originate in actual biology. Computational cell biology will only overcome these concerns once it treats the life-death boundary as a central concept, creating a theory of cellular viability. We lay the foundation for such a development by demonstrating how specific geometric structures can separate regions of qualitatively similar survival outcomes in our models, offering new global organizing principles for cell fate. We also argue that idealized models of emergent individuals offer a tractable way to begin understanding life's intrinsically generated limits.