Biomedical subjects

J B Coe

Publications and source records attributed to J B Coe.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Gompertz mortality law and scaling behavior of the Penna model.

The Penna model is a model of evolutionary ageing through mutation accumulation where traditionally time and the age of an organism are treated as discrete variables and an organism's genome is represented by a binary bit string. We reformulate the asexual Penna model and show that a universal scale invariance emerges as we increase the number of discrete genome bits to the limit of a continuum. The continuum model, introduced by Almeida and Thomas [Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 11, 1209 (2000)] can be recovered from the discrete model in the limit of infinite bits coupled with a vanishing mutation rate per bit. Finally, we show that scale invariant properties may lead to the ubiquitous Gompertz law for mortality rates for early ages, which is generally regarded as being empirical.

Aging↗

PubMed2004

Solvable senescence model with positive mutations.

We build upon our previous analytical results for the Penna model of senescence to include positive mutations. We investigate whether a small but nonzero positive mutation rate gives qualitatively different results to the traditional Penna model in which no positive mutations are considered. We find that the high-lifespan tail of the distribution is radically changed in structure, but that there is not much effect on the bulk of the population. The mortality plateau that we found previously for a stochastic generalization of the Penna model is stable to a small positive mutation rate.

Animals↗

PubMed2004

Population dynamics in the Penna model.

We build upon the recent steady-state Penna model solution [J. B. Coe, Y. Mao, and M. E. Cates, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 288103 (2002)] to study the population dynamics within the Penna model. We show that any perturbation to the population can be broken into a collection of modes each of which decay exponentially with its respective time constant. The long time behavior of population is therefore likely to be dominated by the modes with the largest time constants. We confirm our analytical approach with simulation data.

Adaptation, Physiological↗

PubMed2003

Analytical solution of a generalized Penna model.

In 1995 Penna introduced a simple model of biological aging. A modified Penna model has been demonstrated to exhibit behavior of real-life systems including catastrophic senescence in salmon and a mortality plateau at advanced ages. We present a general steady-state, analytic solution to the Penna model which is able to deal with arbitrary birth and survivability functions. This solution is employed to solve standard variant Penna models studied by simulation. Different Verhulst factors regulating both the birth rate and external death rate are considered.

Aging↗

PubMed2002

Solvable senescence model showing a mortality plateau.

We present some analytic results for the steady states of the Penna model of senescence, generalized to allow genetically identical individuals to die at different ages via an arbitrary survival function. Modeling this with a Fermi function (of modest width) we obtain a clear mortality plateau late in life: something that has so far eluded explanation within such mutation accumulation models. This suggests that factors causing variable mortality within genetically identical subpopulations, which include environmental effects, may be essential to understanding the mortality plateau seen in many real species.

Journal Article↗