Andrea De Martino
Politecnico di Torino & IIGM
Office / Email

Research

• Statistical mechanics, emergent behaviour
• Molecular networks, information processing
• Statistical inference
• Physics/biology interface

Papers (selected, recent, most recent first, links to full text and/or preprint)

• Emergent behaviour and phase transitions in spatially distributed multi-cellular metabolic networks (with K Narayanankutty, JA Pereiro-Morejon, A Ferrero, V Onesto, S Forciniti, LL del Mercato, R Mulet, DS Tourigny, D De Martino)
• Optimal metabolic strategies for microbial growth in stationary random environments (with AP Muntoni)
• Probing single-cell fermentation fluxes and exchange networks via pH-sensing hybrid nanofibers (with V Onesto, S Forciniti, F Alemanno, K Narayanankutty, A Chandra, S Prasad, A Azzariti, G Gigli, A Barra, D De Martino, LL del Mercato)
• Relationship between fitness and heterogeneity in exponentially growing microbial populations (with AP Muntoni, A Braunstein, A Pagnani, D De Martino)
• MicroRNAs organize intrinsic variation into stem cell states (with M Chakraborty, S Hu, E Visness, M Del Giudice, C Bosia, PA Sharp, S Garg)
• Competing endogenous RNA crosstalk at system level (with M Miotto, E Marinari)
• A yield-cost tradeoff governs Escherichia coli's decision between fermentation and respiration in carbon-limited growth (with M Mori, E Marinari)
• Exploration-exploitation tradeoffs dictate the optimal distributions of phenotypes for populations subject to fitness fluctuations [arXiv] (with M Miotto, T Gueudre)
• Statistics of optimal information flow in ensembles of regulatory motifs [arXiv] (with J Fiorentino, A Crisanti)
• Translating ceRNA susceptibilities into correlation functions [bioRXiv] (with A Martirosyan, M Marsili)
• Microenvironmental cooperation promotes early spread and bistability of a Warburg-like phenotype (with J Fernandez-de-Cossio-Diaz, R Mulet)
• Constrained Allocation Flux Balance Analysis (with M Mori, T Hwa, OC Martin, E Marinari)
• Growth against entropy in bacterial metabolism: the phenotypic trade-off behind empirical growth rate distributions in Escherichia coli [arXiv] (with D De Martino, F Capuani)
• Probing the limits to microRNA-mediated control of gene expression (with A Martirosyan, M Figliuzzi, E Marinari)
• Inferring metabolic phenotypes from the exometabolome through a thermodynamic variational principle [arXiv] (with D De Martino, F Capuani)
• RNA-Based Regulation: Dynamics and Response to Perturbations of Competing RNAs (with M Figliuzzi, E Marinari)
• Boolean constraint satisfaction problems for reaction networks [arXiv] (with A Seganti, F Ricci Tersenghi)
• MicroRNAs as a selective channel of communication between competing RNAs: a steady state theory (with M Figliuzzi, E Marinari)

Reviews and book chapters (most recent first, links to full text and/or preprint)

• Out-of-equilibrium ceRNA crosstalk (with E Ferro, C Szischik, M Cunial, AC Ventura, C Bosia)
• Metabolic diversity in cell populations: probability densities over the flux polytope (with M Rivas Astroza)
• Statistical-physics approaches to RNA molecules, families and networks (with S Cocco, A Pagnani, M Weigt)
• Kinetic modelling of competition and depletion of shared miRNAs by competing endogenous RNAs [arXiv] (with A Martirosyan, M Del Giudice, C Enrico Bena, A Pagnani, C Bosia)
• An introduction to the maximum entropy approach and its application to inference problems in biology (with D De Martino)
• Statistical mechanics of socio-economic systems with heterogeneous agents [arXiv] (with M Marsili) (older article covering my work on games, interacting agents, and all that)

Teaching (undergrad)

• Starting 2025 : Fisica I [Problemi] (Politecnico di Torino)
• Since 2021 : Fisica II (Politecnico di Torino)
• 2011-16 : Biofisica Teorica (Sapienza Univ di Roma)
• 2010-11 : Fisica Statistica dei Sistemi Biologici (Sapienza Univ di Roma)