Related papers: Relationship between cellular response and behavio…
The effects of internal adaptation dynamics on the self-organized aggregation of chemotactic bacteria are investigated by Monte Carlo (MC) simulations based on a two-stream kinetic transport equation coupled with a reaction-diffusion…
Flux analysis is a class of constraint-based approaches to the study of biochemical reaction networks: they are based on determining the reaction flux configurations compatible with given stoichiometric and thermodynamic constraints. One of…
Aerotaxis is the particular form of chemotaxis in which oxygen plays the role of both the attractant and the repellent. Aerotaxis occurs without methylation adaptation, and it leads to fast and complete aggregation toward the most favorable…
Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…
In this thesis, we have studied the large scale structure and system level dynamics of certain biological networks using tools from graph theory, computational biology and dynamical systems. We study the structure and dynamics of large…
Eukaryotic cells respond to a chemoattractant gradient by forming intracellular gradients of signaling molecules that reflect the extracellular chemical gradient - an ability called directional sensing. Quantitative experiments have…
Background: Using a statistical physics approach, we study the stochastic switching behavior of a model circuit of multisite phosphorylation and dephosphorylation with feedback. The circuit consists of a kinase and phosphatase acting on…
A large variety of microorganisms produce molecules to communicate via complex signaling mechanisms such as quorum sensing and chemotaxis. The biological diversity is enormous, but synthetic inanimate colloidal microswimmers mimic…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
A growing amount of evidence points to the fact that many enzymes exhibit fluctuations in their catalytic activity, which are associated with conformational changes on a broad range of timescales. The experimental study of this phenomenon,…
Auto-regulatory feedback loops are one of the most common network motifs. A wide variety of stochastic models have been constructed to understand how the fluctuations in protein numbers in these loops are influenced by the kinetic…
Gene-knockout experiments on single-cell organisms have established that expression of a substantial fraction of genes is not needed for optimal growth. This problem acquired a new dimension with the recent discovery that environmental and…
We study the effect of chemotactic signaling among mesenchymal cells. We show that the particular physiology of the mesenchymal cells allows one-dimensional collapse in contrast to the case of bacteria, and that the mesenchymal…
Fluctuating environments pose tremendous challenges to bacterial populations. It is observed in numerous bacterial species that individual cells can stochastically switch among multiple phenotypes for the population to survive in rapidly…
Recent genomic analyses on the cellular metabolic network show that reaction flux across enzymes are diverse and exhibit power-law behavior in its distribution. While one may guess that the reactions with larger fluxes are more likely to be…
T cell receptor signaling must operate reliably under tight time constraints. While assuming quite different mechanisms, two prominent models of T cell receptor activation, kinetic segregation and kinetic proofreading, both introduce a…
Chemotaxis is a fundamental mechanism of cells and organisms, which is responsible for attracting microbes to food, embryonic cells into developing tissues, or immune cells to infection sites. Mathematically chemotaxis is described by the…
Many membrane channels and receptors exhibit adaptive, or desensitized, response to a strong sustained input stimulus, often supported by protein activity-dependent inactivation. Adaptive response is thought to be related to various…
Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…
Chemotaxis, i.e. motion generated by chemical gradients, is a motility mode shared by many living species that has been developed by evolution to optimize certain biological processes such as foraging or immune response. In particular,…