Economic Principles in Cell Biology          

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Economic Principles in Cell Biology
A free textbook

How can a cell maintain itself as a living being? Living cells, shaped by billions of years of evolution, have developed many ways to adapt to their environment, for example by regulation of gene expression. But the rules of physics and chemistry enforce certain boundaries on what cells can achieve and how they can allocate their own resources. Shaped by evolution, cells are able to "do certain things right", and our goal is to uncover some of the principles behind this.

In our open textbook, to which everyone is invited to contribute, we give an overview of established approaches to cellular economics, from descriptions of simple metabolic systems to cell growth, variability, and dynamic behavior.

For more information about our project, see our website for authors.

To join us in writing this textbook, please get in touch!


Edition July 2024

Our book is being developed continuously, with updated versions released every 3 months. Below you can find the current version. The book and single chapters (in a preprint version) are also available on zenodo.

  1. Read the book in your browser (opening the pdf may take a while)
  2. Download single chapters (pdf)
  3. Download the book (normal pdf version)
  4. Download the book e-book version (pdf formatted for e-book readers)
  5. Download the book print version (pdf formatted for print on demand)

To cite this book: Economic Principles in Cell Biology (2024). The Economic Cell Collective. No commercial publisher | Authors open access book. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.8156386.

Authors

The Economic Cell Collective is an informal international group of researchers. You are very welcome to join!

See the list of authors and supporting institutions.

Give us your feedback

To give us your feedback about the book, please fill in this form. Your comments may concern a specific chapter or the entire book. It can really be anything: typos, factual mistakes, extra information you think should be added, ideas for new chapters, etc. For longer reviews, you can attach a separate document. For any issues or if you would like to speak to us in person, feel free to contact us at epcb-book-organizers@googlegroups.com.

How to contribute

This project thrives on collaboration, and we're grateful for your willingness to support it. You are welcome contribute to our book! To learn more about what you can do, please follow this link!

Summer school lectures

Most book chapters have been presented as lectures at our summer schools at LPI Paris. Lecture slides are available here.

Copyright

The book is published under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA. This license allows you to share and adapt (also for commercial purposes) if you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate whether changes were made. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license CC BY-SA.

Contact

To contact us, please send an email to epcb-book-organizers@googlegroups.com. You can also get in touch with us through our twitter account x.com/economic_cell. Please use the hashtag #celleconomics to promote and discuss the textbook chapters.

For more information, please visit our website for authors