Cell Behavior
A ubiquitous feature of living cells is their growth over time followed by division into daughter cells. How isogenic cell populations maintain size homeostasis, i.e., a narrow distribution of cell size, is an intriguing fundamental…
The effects of pulsatile GnRH stimulation on anterior pituitary cells are studied using perifusion cell cultures, where constantly moving medium over the immo- bilized cells allows intermittent GnRH delivery. The LH content of the outgoing…
Phagocytosis and receptor-mediated endocytosis are vitally important particle uptake mechanisms in many cell types, ranging from single-cell organisms to immune cells. In both processes, engulfment by the cell depends critically on both…
Self-assembly of proteins into amyloid aggregates is an important biological phenomenon associated with human diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Amyloid fibrils also have potential applications in nano-engineering of biomaterials. The…
Substrate-based cell motility is essential for fundamental biological processes, such as tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. Even if a comprehensive understanding of this motility mode remains elusive, progress has been…
Transcriptional regulation by transcription factors and post-transcriptional regulation by microRNAs constitute two major modes of regulation of gene expression. While gene expression motifs incorporating solely transcriptional regulation…
Coherent angular rotation of epithelial cells is thought to contribute to many vital physiological processes including tissue morphogenesis and glandular formation. However, factors regulating this motion, and the implications of this…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
Experiments have shown that bacteria can be sensitive to small variations in chemoattractant (CA) concentrations. Motivated by these findings, our focus here is on a regime rarely studied in experiments: bacteria tracking point CA sources…
Adsorption of proteins onto membranes can alter the local membrane curvature. This phenomenon has been observed in biological processes such as endocytosis, tubulation and vesiculation. However, it is not clear how the local surface…
Collective cell responses to exogenous cues depend on cell-cell interactions. In principle, these can result in enhanced sensitivity to weak and noisy stimuli. However, this has not yet been shown experimentally, and, little is known about…
The progression of a cell population where each individual is characterized by the value of an internal variable varying with time (e.g. size, weight, and protein concentration) is typically modeled by a Population Balance Equation, a first…
Single cells often generate precise responses by involving dissipative out-of-thermodynamic equilibrium processes in signaling networks. The available free energy to fuel these processes could become limited depending on the metabolic state…
We propose a multiscale model of the invasion of the extracellular matrix by two types of cancer cells, the differentiated cancer cells and the cancer stem cells. We assume that the epithelial mesenchymal-like transition between them is…
Bone's mechanostat theory describes the adaptation of bone tissues to their mechanical environment. Many experiments have investigated and observed such structural adaptation. However, there is still much uncertainty about how to define the…
The work is devoted to the analysis of cell population dynamics where cells make a choice between differentiation and apoptosis. This choice is based on the values of intracellular proteins whose concentrations are described by a system of…
Emulate the gating mechanism of ionic channels in neurons, we present a mathematical model for the time constant of dynamical systems. Our model is an analytical continues function. The analyses give evidence that one can adjust the…
Cell differentiation in multicellular organisms is a complex process whose mechanism can be understood by a reductionist approach, in which the individual processes that control the generation of different cell types are identified.…
A theory of fractional kinetics of glial cancer cells is presented. A role of the migration-proliferation dichotomy in the fractional cancer cell dynamics in the outer-invasive zone is discussed an explained in the framework of a continuous…
Motivation: LTR retrotransposons are mobile elements that are able, like retroviruses, to copy and move inside eukaryotic genomes. In the present work, we propose a branching model for studying the propagation of LTR retrotransposons in…