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The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine…
"Secrete-and-sense cells" can communicate by secreting a signaling molecule while also producing a receptor that detects the molecule. The cell can potentially "talk" to itself ("self-communication") or talk to neighboring cells with the…
Physical thermodynamic and kinetic, chemical and biological reasoning restrict the spatial dimensions of living cells and confine them to between one and one hundred micrometers. Cells should necessarily be macroscopic, dissipative objects,…
Cells continuously probe their environment with membrane receptors, achieving subsecond adaptation of their behaviour [1-3]. Recently, several receptors, including cadherins, were found to bind ligands with a lifetime of order of one…
The depinning of an elastic line interacting with a quenched disorder is studied for long range interactions, applicable to crack propagation or wetting. An ultrametric distance is introduced instead of the Euclidean distance, allowing for…
The manner in which signals propagate through dense granular systems in both space and time is not well understood. In order to learn more about this process, we carry out discrete element simulations of the system response to excitations…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
Many active fluid systems encountered in biology are set in total geometric confinement. Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells is a prominent and ubiquitous example, in which cargo-carrying molecular motors move along polymer filaments and…
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
Extended systems driven through strong disorder are modeled generically using coarse-grained degrees of freedom that interact elastically in the directions parallel to the driving force and that slip along at least one of the directions…
Signal duration (e.g. the time scales over which an active signaling intermediate persists) is a key regulator of biological decisions in myriad contexts such as cell growth, proliferation, and developmental lineage commitments.…
Rebinding kinetics of molecular ligands plays a critical role in biomachinery, from regulatory networks to protein transcription, and is also a key factor for designing drugs and high-precision biosensors.In this study, we investigate…
In this article, we study the kinetics of reversible ligand binding to receptors on a spherical cell surface using a self-consistent stochastic theory. Binding, dissociation, diffusion and rebinding of ligands are incorporated into the…
Cells can sense and respond to mechanical signals over relatively long distances across fibrous extracellular matrices. Here, we explore all of the key factors that influence long range force transmission in cell-populated collagen…
We show that the exponential length distribution that is typical of actin filaments under physiological conditions dramatically narrows in the presence of (i) crosslinker proteins (ii) polyvalent counterions or (iii) depletion mediated…
Cells and organisms follow aligned structures in their environment, a process that can generate persistent migration paths. Kinetic transport equations are a popular modelling tool for describing biological movements at the mesoscopic…
We analyze long range wave propagation in three-dimensional random waveguides. The waves are trapped by top and bottom boundaries, but the medium is unbounded in the two remaining directions. We consider scalar waves, and motivated by…
The immunological synapse is a patterned collection of different types of receptors and ligands that forms in the intercellular junction between T Cells and antigen presenting cells (APCs) during recognition. The synapse is implicated in…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…