2000/05/10 by Carlos Alberto Perazzo, Carlos A. Perazzo, Elmer A. Fernández +7
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Fractal and DNA sequence analysis #Protein Structure and Dynamics #Quantitative Biology (q-bio) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.stat-mech #nlin.AO #physics.bio-ph #q-bio
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.physics/0005029
11 pages, 3 eps figures. Accepted in Fractals
arxiv created 2000/05/10 · openalex publication_date 2000/05/10 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
All types of blood cells are formed by differentiation from a small self-maintaining population of pluri-potential stem cells in the bone marrow. Despite abundant information on the molecular aspects of division, differentiation, commitment and maturation of these cells, comparatively little is known about the dynamics of the system as a whole, and how it works to maintain this complex ``ecology'' in the observed normal ranges throughout life. Here we report unexpected large, scale-free, fluctuations detected from the first long-term analysis of the day-to-day variability of a healthy animal's blood cell counts measured over one thousand days. This scale-invariance cannot be accounted for by current theoretical models, and resembles some of the scenarios described for self-organized criticality.