Cell Behavior
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
The paradigm of phenotypic plasticity indicates reversible relations of different cancer cell phenotypes, which extends the cellular hierarchy proposed by the classical cancer stem cell (CSC) theory. Since it is still question able if the…
For various cell types and for lamellipodial fragments on flat surfaces, externally induced and spontaneous transitions between symmetric nonmoving states and polarized migration have been observed. This behavior is indicative of…
Morphogenesis is a developmental process in which cells organize into shapes and patterns. Complex, multi-factorial models are commonly used to study morphogenesis. It is difficult to understand the relation between the uncertainty in the…
During angiogenesis, endothelial cells compete for the tip position during angiogenesis: a phenomenon named tip cell overtaking. It is still unclear to what extent tip cell overtaking is a side effect of sprouting or to what extent a…
Studying the development of malignant tumours, it is important to know and predict the proportions of different cell types in tissue samples. Knowing the expected temporal evolution of the proportion of normal tissue cells, compared to…
Multiple myeloma is a plasma cell cancer that leads to a dysregulated bone remodeling process. We present a partial differential equation model describing the dynamics of bone remodeling with the presence of myeloma tumor cells. The model…
Transposable elements are DNA sequences that can move around to different positions in the genome. During this process, they can cause mutations, and lead to an increase in genome size. Despite representing a large genomic fraction,…
The dynamics of tumor cell populations is hotly debated: do populations derive hierarchically from a subpopulation of cancer stem cells (CSCs), or are stochastic transitions that mutate differentiated cancer cells to CSCs important? Here we…
Populations of mammalian stem cells commonly exhibit considerable cell-cell variability. However, the functional role of this diversity is unclear. Here, we analyze expression fluctuations of the stem cell surface marker Sca1 in mouse…
A self-consistent model is developed to investigate attachment / detachment kinetics of two soft, deformable microspheres with irregular surface and coated with flexible binding ligands. The model highlights how the microscale binding…
We analyse a minimal model for the primary response in the adaptive immune system comprising three different players: antigens, T and B cells. We assume B-T interactions to be diluted and sampled locally from heterogeneous degree…
The phenotypic equilibrium, i.e. heterogeneous population of cancer cells tending to a fixed equilibrium of phenotypic proportions, has received much attention in cancer biology very recently. In previous literature, some theoretical models…
We present a theoretical agent-based model of cell evolution under the action of cytotoxic treatments, such as radioteraphy or chemoteraphy. The major features of cell cycle and proliferation, cell damage and repair, and chemical diffusion…
It is known that the orientation of cellulose microfibrils within plant cell walls has an important impact on the morphogenesis of plant cells and tissues. Viewing the shape of a plant cell as a square prism or cylinder with the axis…
Recent experimental work has shown that eukaryotic cells can swim in a fluid as well as crawl on a substrate. We investigate the swimming behavior of Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae who swim by initiating traveling protrusions at the front…
Computational modelling is helpful for elucidating the cellular mechanisms driving biological morphogenesis. Previous simulation studies of blood vessel growth based on the Cellular Potts model (CPM) proposed that elongated, adhesive or…
Stem cell transplants may be considered as dynamical systems to allow sequence differences across the exomes of the transplant donors and recipients to be used to simulate an alloreactive T cell response. Whole exome sequencing was…
The dynamics of gene transcription is tightly regulated in eukaryotes. Recent experiments have revealed various kinds of transcriptional dynamics, such as RNA polymerase II pausing, that involves regulation at the transcription initiation…
We investigated the growth-temperature relationship in plants using a quantitative perspective of a recently derived growth functional. We showed that auxin-induced growth is achieved by the diffusion rate, which is almost constant or…