There is a network at Oxford know as QBIOX that aims to connect researchers in the quantitative biosciences. They try to foster collaborations across the university and organize symposia where people from various departments can share their quantitative approaches to biology. Today was my second or third time attending, and I wanted to share a brief overview of the three talks by Philip Maini, Edward Morrissey, and Heather Harrington. In the process, we’ll get to…

Continue reading

Last week, Jacob Scott was at a meeting to celebrate the establishment of the Center for Evolutionary Therapy at Moffitt, and he presented our work on measuring the effective games that non-small cell lung cancer plays (see this preprint for the latest draft). From the audience, David Basanta summarized it in a tweet as “trying to make our game theory models less abstract”. But I actually saw our work as doing the opposite (and so…

Continue reading

I’ve seen a number of people that have aimed for reading one paper a day for every day of the year. Unfortunately, I am not great at new years resolutions, and would never be able to keep pace for all 365 days. Instead, in April I tried a one paper a day challenge for the month. I still came up short, only finishing 24 of 30 papers. But I guess that is enough for one…

Continue reading

There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and yet there are more than twenty-six letters in this sentence. How do we make sense of this? Ever since I first started collaborating with David Basanta and Jacob Scott back in 2012/13, a certain tension about evolutionary games has been gnawing at me. A feeling that a couple of different concepts are being swept up under the rug of a single name.[1] This feeling became…

Continue reading

Recently, I’ve been working on revisions for our paper on measuring the games that cancer plays. One of the concerns raised by the editor is that we don’t spend enough time introducing game theory and in particular the Deadlock and Leader games that we observed. This is in large part due to the fact that these are not the most exciting games and not much theoretic efforts have been spent on them in the past.…

Continue reading

Happy 2018! With 2017 finally behind us, TheEGG enters its 8th calendar year. This past year has been a slow one for the blog, with only 10 new articles and two posts cataloguing 2016 (on cancer and on more theoretical aspects of evolution and general modelling). Half the months were barren: I posted nothing in March, April, May, July, August, September; and only October and November saw more than one post. But those two months…

Continue reading

Over the years of TheEGG, I’ve chronicled a number of nice properties of the replicator equation and its wide range of applications. From a theoretical perspective, I showed how the differential version can serve as the generator for the action that is the finite difference version of replicator dynamics. And how measurements of replicator dynamics can correspond to log-odds. From an application perspective, I talked about how replicator dynamics can be realized in many different…

Continue reading

Greetings, Theory, Evolution and Games Group! It’s a pleasure to be on the other side of the keyboard today. Many thanks to Artem for the invite to write about some of our recent work and the opportunity to introduce myself via this post. I do a bit of blogging of my own over at vcannataro.com — mostly about neat science I stumble over while figuring out my way. I’m a biologist. I study the evolutionary…

Continue reading

In Artem’s previous post about the IMO workshop he suggests that “[s]ince we are forced to move from the genetic to the epigenetic level of description, it becomes important to suggest a plausible mechanism for heritable epigenetic effects. We need to find a stochastic ratcheted phenotypic switch among the pathways of the CMML cells.” Here I’ll go into more detail about modeling this ratcheting and how to go about identifying the mechanism. We can think…

Continue reading

For those of us attending the 7th annual Integrated Mathematical Oncology workshop (IMO7) at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, this week was a gruelling yet exciting set of four near-all-nighters. Participants were grouped into five teams and were tasked with coming up with a new model to elucidate a facet of a particular type of cancer. With $50k on the line and enthusiasm for creating evolutionary models, Team Orange (the wonderful team I had…

Continue reading