Cell Behavior
Understanding cell-fate decisions during tumorigenesis and metastasis is a major challenge in modern cancer biology. One canonical cell-fate decision that cancer cells undergo is Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and its reverse…
Background: Living cells of many types need to move in response to external stimuli in order to accomplish their functional tasks; these tasks range from wound healing to immune response to fertilization. While the directional motion is…
We present a study investigating the role of mitochondrial variability in generating noise in eukaryotic cells. Noise in cellular physiology plays an important role in many fundamental cellular processes, including transcription,…
We present a continuum model of the coupling between cells and substrate that accounts for some of the observed substrate-stiffness dependence of cell properties. The cell is modeled as an elastic active gel, adapting recently developed…
All cells derive nutrition by absorbing some chemical and energy resources from the environment; these resources are used by the cells to reproduce the chemicals within them, which in turn leads to an increase in their volume. In this…
A large number of eukaryotic cells are able to directly detect external chemical gradients with great accuracy and the ultimate limit to their sensitivity has been a topic of debate for many years. Previous work has been done to understand…
Theoretical and computational tools that can be used in the clinic to predict neoplastic progression and propose individualized optimal treatment strategies to control cancer growth is desired. To develop such a predictive model, one must…
The Wnt signalling pathway transducing the stabilization of beta-catenin is essential for metazoan embryo development and is misregulated in many diseases such as cancers. In recent years models have been proposed for the Wnt signalling…
We present a generic model of cell motility generated by acto-myosin contraction of the cell cortex. We identify analytically dynamical instabilities of the cortex and show that they trigger spontaneous cortical flows which in turn can…
Current biological knowledge supports the existence of a secondary group of cancer cells within the body of the tumour that exhibits stem cell-like properties. These cells are termed Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs}, and as opposed to the more…
We describe in this work the numerical treatment of the Filament Based Lamellipodium Model (FBLM). The model itself is a two-phase two-dimensional continuum model, describing the dynamics of two interacting families of locally parallel…
Several firing patterns experimentally observed in neural populations have been successfully correlated to animal behavior. Population bursting, hereby regarded as a period of high firing rate followed by a period of quiescence, is…
For understanding the origin of life, it is essential to explain the development of a compartmentalized structure, which undergoes growth and division, from a set of chemical reactions. In this study, a hypercycle with two chemicals that…
A promising direction in drug development is to exploit the ability of natural killer cells to kill antibody-labeled target cells. Monoclonal antibodies and drugs designed to elicit this effect typically bind cell-surface epitopes that are…
Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…
The system of partial differential equations describing tumor-immune dynamics with angiogenesis taken into account is presented. For spatially homogeneous case, the steady state analysis of the model is carried out. The effects of single…
Regulation of mRNA decay is a critical component of global cellular adaptation to changing environments. The corresponding changes in mRNA lifetimes can be coordinated with changes in mRNA transcription rates to fine-tune gene expression.…
During embryonic development, differentiating cells respond via gene expression to positional cues from morphogen gradients. While gene expression is often highly erratic, embryonic development is precise. We show by theory and simulations…
Many types of cells are able to accurately sense shallow gradients of chemicals across their diameters, allowing the cells to move towards or away from chemical sources. This chemotactic ability relies on the remarkable capacity of cells to…
On the basis of a model we capture the role of strong attractive interaction in suppressing the rotational degrees of freedom of the system and volume exclusion in keeping microscopic symmetry-breaking intact to result in super-diffusive…