Stochastic gradient descent on the epigenetic landscape: a unified framework for cellular plasticity, tumor heterogeneity, and the asymptotic irrelevance of fitness

Phenotypic plasticity, the ability of cells to switch between states, is central to development, differentiation, and therapy resistance. Although it is modeled at several scales, from compartmental ODEs to phenotype-structured PDEs and single-cell stochastic equations, a framework connecting these