Cell Behavior
Cancer is a disease involving many genes, consequently it has been difficult to design anticancer drugs that are efficacious over a broad range of cancers. The robustness of cellular responses to gene knockout and the need to reduce…
Cell-to-cell variations in protein abundance in clonal cell populations are ubiquitous in living systems. Since protein composition determines responses in individual cells, it stands to reason that the variations themselves are subject to…
Transition from random to persistent cell motility requires spatiotemporal organization of the cytoskeleton and focal adhesions. The influence of these two structures on cell steering can also be gleaned from trypsin de-adhesion…
Adaptive response to a varying environment is a common feature of biological organisms. Reproducing such features in electronic systems and circuits is of great importance for a variety of applications. Here, we consider memory models…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
In this report, we hypothesize that natural phenolic compounds may present a new class of chemotherapeutics against migration of metastatic triple-negative breast cancers (TNBC). In this project we will screen a small library of phenolic…
Control of the cytoskeleton and mechanical contacts with the extracellular environment are essential component of motility in eukaryotic cells. In the absence of signals, cells continuously rebuild the cytoskeleton and periodically extend…
One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…
During migration, amoeboid cells perform a cycle of quasi-periodic repetitive events (motility cycle). the cell length and the strain energy exchanged with the substrate oscillate in time with an average frequency, f, on top of which are…
We consider the problem of self tolerance in the frame of a minimalistic model of the idiotypic network. A node of this network represents a population of B lymphocytes of the same idiotype which is encoded by a bit string. The links of the…
Background: AQP1 belongs to aquaporins family, water-specific, membrane-channel proteins expressed in diverse tissues. Recent papers showed that during angiogenesis, AQP1 is expressed preferentially by microvessels, favoring angiogenesis…
Microbiological systems evolve to fulfill their tasks with maximal efficiency. The immune system is a remarkable example, where self-non self distinction is accomplished by means of molecular interaction between self proteins and antigens,…
The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…
We analyze experimental observations of microtubules undergoing small fluctuations about a "balance point" when mixed in solution of two different kinesin motor proteins, KLP61F and Ncd. It has been proposed that the microtubule movement is…
The epigenetic pathway of a cell as it differentiates from a stem cell state to a mature lineage-committed one has been historically understood in terms of Waddington's landscape, consisting of hills and valleys. The smooth top and…
Cycling tissues such as the intestinal epithelium, germ line, and hair follicles, require a constant flux of differentiated cells. These tissues are maintained by a population of stem cells, which generate differentiated progenies and…
Although the immune response is often regarded as acting to suppress tumor growth, it is now clear that it can be both stimulatory and inhibitory. The interplay between these competing influences has complex implications for tumor…
A discrete model for computer simulations of the clustering dynamics of Social Amoebae is presented. This model incorporates the wavelike propagation of extracellular signaling cAMP, the sporadic firing of cells at early stage of…
A pathway-based mean-field theory (PBMFT) was recently proposed for E. coli chemotaxis in [G. Si, T. Wu, Q. Quyang and Y. Tu, Phys. Rev. Lett., 109 (2012), 048101]. In this paper, we derived a new moment system of PBMFT by using the moment…
In the human immune system, T-helper cells are able to differentiate into two lymphocyte subsets: Th1 and Th2. The intracellular signaling pathways of differentiation form a dynamic regulation network by secreting distinctive types of…