Cell Behavior
To rapidly coordinate collective behaviors in tissues, cells communicate with one another through traveling fronts of signaling activity called trigger waves. The stimulus threshold for wave propagation is a key biological parameter that…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
Neuroinflammation immediately follows the onset of ischemic stroke in the middle cerebral artery. During this process, microglial cells are activated in and recruited to the penumbra. Microglial cells can be activated into two different…
Chemotaxis, the movement of an organism in response to chemical stimuli, is a typical feature of many microbiological systems. In particular, the social amoeba \textit{Disctyostelium discoideum} is widely used as a model organism, but it is…
Recent measurements of Norway spruce have revealed stress-state-dependent normalized creep behavior, highlighting a gap in our fundamental understanding. This study examines whether the anisotropic response originates from the…
The advent of single-cell multi-omics technologies has enabled the simultaneous profiling of diverse omics layers within individual cells. Integrating such multimodal data provides unprecedented insights into cellular identity, regulatory…
We derive the main properties of adaptive Hagen-Poiseuille flows in elastic microchannel networks similar to biological veins found in organisms. We demonstrate that adaptive Hagen-Poiseuille flows effectively simulate key features of…
Tip growth in filamentous cells, such as root hairs, moss protonemata, and fungal hyphae, depends on coordinated cell wall extension driven by turgor pressure, wall mechanics, and exocytosis. We introduce a dual-configuration model that…
Neuroinflammation immediately follows the onset of ischemic stroke. During this process, microglial cells are activated in and recruited to the tissue surrounding the irreversibly injured infarct core, referred to as the penumbra.…
While disproven by S. Carnot 200 years ago, corpuscularianism (the philosophy that the states of individual molecules determine the state of a system of those molecules) is still widely used to describe biological function. Nowhere is this…
We study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…
The emerging field of immunometabolism has underscored the central role of metabolic pathways in orchestrating immune cell function. Far from being passive background processes, metabolic activities actively regulate key immune responses.…
Diabetes is a civilization chronic disease characterized by a constant elevated concentration of glucose in the blood. Many processes are involved in the glucose regulation, and their interactions are very complex. To better understand…
Cell size control is crucial for maintaining cellular function and homeostasis. In this study, we develop a first-order partial differential equation model to examine the effects of three key size control mechanisms: the sizer, timer, and…
We investigate the oscillatory dynamics and bifurcation structure of a reaction-diffusion system with bistable nonlinearity and mass conservation, which was proposed by [Otsuji et al, PLoS Comp. Biol. 3 (2007), e108]. The system is a useful…
Over the past decades, nonlocal models have been widely used to describe aggregation phenomena in biology, physics, engineering, and the social sciences. These are often derived as mean-field limits of attraction-repulsion agent-based…
Single-cell organisms and various cell types use a range of motility modes when following a chemical gradient, but it is unclear which mode is best suited for different gradients. Here, we model directional decision-making in chemotactic…
Biological and artificial networks routinely make reliable distinctions between similar inputs, and the rules for making these distinctions are learned. In some ways, self/nonself discrimination in the immune system is similar, being both…
Many drugs have been withdrawn from the market worldwide, at a cost of billions of dollars, because of patient fatalities due to them unexpectedly disturbing heart rhythm. Even drugs for ailments as mild as hay fever have been withdrawn due…
Cell membrane tension directly influences various cellular functions. In this study, we developed a method to estimate surface tension from time-series data. We obtained the curvature-velocity relationship from time-series of binarized cell…