Related papers: Positive feedback and noise activate the stringent…
A common survival strategy of microorganisms subjected to stress involves the generation of phenotypic heterogeneity in the isogenic microbial population enabling a subset of the population to survive under stress. In a recent study, a…
Inside individual cells, expression of genes is stochastic across organisms ranging from bacterial to human cells. A ubiquitous feature of stochastic expression is burst-like synthesis of gene products, which drives considerable…
A single gene, regulating its own expression via a positive feedback loop, constitutes a common motif in gene regulatory networks and signalling cascades. Recent experiments on the development of competence in the bacterial population…
Gene regulatory circuits must contend with intrinsic noise that arises due to finite numbers of proteins. While some circuits act to reduce this noise, others appear to exploit it. A striking example is the competence circuit in Bacillus…
Feedback loops are essential for regulating cell proliferation and maintaining the delicate balance between cell division and cell death. Thanks to the exact solution of a few simple models of cell growth it is by now clear that stochastic…
One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…
Transcriptional repression may cause transcriptional noise by a competition between repressor and RNA polymerase binding. Although promoter activity is often governed by a single limiting step, we argue here that the size of the noise…
Positive feedback and cooperativity in the regulation of gene expression are generally considered to be necessary for obtaining bistable expression states. Recently, a novel mechanism of bistability termed emergent bistability has been…
Cell phenotype dynamic homeostasis contrasts with the inherent randomness of intracellular reactions. Although feedback control of master regulatory genes (MRG) is a key strategy for maintaining gene network expression ranges limited,…
Gene expression in cells is stochastic, yet differentiation is robust. We propose a mechanism in which frustrated genes with weakly stable intermediate expression undergo noise-driven switching between basins of attraction, followed by…
We consider a reaction-diffusion system with discontinuous reaction terms modeled by non-ideal relays. The system is motivated by an epigenetic population model of evolution of two-phenotype bacteria which switch phenotype in response to…
Phenotypic heterogeneity along the epithelial-mesenchymal (E-M) axis contributes to cancer metastasis and drug resistance. Recent experimental efforts have collated detailed time-course data on the emergence and dynamics of E-M…
We formulate and analyze a theoretical model for the regulation of microtubule (MT) polymerization dynamics by the signaling proteins Rac1 and stathmin. In cells, the MT growth rate is inhibited by cytosolic stathmin, which, in turn, is…
Many cell types exhibit oscillatory activity, such as repetitive action potential firing due to the Hodgkin-Huxley dynamics of ion channels in the cell membrane or reveal intracellular inositol triphosphate (IP$_3$) mediated calcium…
Chemical reactions in cell are subject to intense stochastic fluctuations. An important question is how the fundamental physiological behavior of cell is kept stable against those noisy perturbations. In this paper a stochastic model of…
Within individual bacteria, we combine force-dependent polymerization dynamics of individual MreB protofilaments with an elastic model of protofilament bundles buckled into helical configurations. We use variational techniques and…
Homeostasis is a running theme in biology. Often achieved through feedback regulation strategies, homeostasis allows living cells to control their internal environment as a means for surviving changing and unfavourable environments. While…
Rippling patterns of myxobacteria appear in starving colonies before they aggregate to form fruiting bodies. These periodic traveling cell density waves arise from the coordination of individual cell reversals, resulting from an internal…
Stochasticity in gene expression can give rise to fluctuations in protein levels and lead to phenotypic variation across a population of genetically identical cells. Recent experiments indicate that bursting and feedback mechanisms play…
Gene products (RNAs, proteins) often occur at low molecular counts inside individual cells, and hence are subject to considerable random fluctuations (noise) in copy number over time. Not surprisingly, cells encode diverse regulatory…