Related papers: Positive feedback and noise activate the stringent…
Several studies highlighted the relevance of extrinsic noise in shaping cell decision making and differentiation in molecular networks. Experimental evidences of phenotypic differentiation are given by the presence of bimodal distributions…
The transient response to a stimulus and subsequent recovery to a steady state are the fundamental characteristics of a living organism. Here we study the relaxation kinetics of autoregulatory gene networks based on the chemical master…
Bacterial chemotaxis in Escherichia coli is a canonical system for the study of signal transduction. A remarkable feature of this system is the coexistence of precise adaptation in population with large fluctuating cellular behavior in…
Calcium and reactive oxygen species (ROS) interact with each other and play an important role in cell signaling networks. Based on the existing mathematical models, we develop an age-dependent feedback control model to simulate the…
During organismal development, biochemical reaction networks sense and respond to mechanical forces to coordinate embryonic patterning with embryo morphogenesis. Factors such as cortical tension, cell density, and matrix mechanical…
Clustering of molecules on biological membranes is a widely observed phenomenon. In some cases, such as the clustering of Ras proteins on the membranes of mammalian cells, proper cell signaling is critically dependent on the maintenance of…
Individual cells exhibit substantial heterogeneity in protein abundance and activity, which is frequently reflected in broad distributions of fluorescently labeled reporters. Since all cellular components are intrinsically fluorescent to…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
Some microbial organisms are known to randomly slip into and out of hibernation, irrespective of environmental conditions [1]. In a (genetically) uniform population a typically very small subpopulation becomes metabolically inactive whereas…
Proliferating cell collectives often develop an active growth layer near their boundary that regulates expansion and morphology, as observed in systems ranging from bacterial biofilms to epithelial tissues and tumor spheroids. While such…
MicroRNAs are endogenous non-coding RNAs which negatively regulate the expression of protein-coding genes in plants and animals. They are known to play an important role in several biological processes and, together with transcription…
Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…
Gene expression is a noisy process and several mechanisms, both transcriptional and posttranscriptional, can stabilize protein levels in cells. Much work has focused on the role of miRNAs, showing in particular that miRNA-mediated…
It has recently been suggested that the competition for a finite pool of microRNAs (miRNA) gives rise to effective interactions among their common targets (competing endogenous RNAs or ceRNAs) that could prove to be crucial for…
We study the functional characteristics of a two-gene motif consisting of a double positive feedback loop and an autoregulatory negative feedback loop. The motif appears in the gene regulatory network controlling the functional activity of…
Mechanical cues like the rigidity of the substrate are main determinants for the decision making of adherent cells. Here we use a mechano-chemical model to predict the cellular response to varying substrate stiffness. The model equations…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…
Heterogeneity in gene expression across isogenic cell populations can give rise to phenotypic diversity, even when cells are in homogenous environments. This diversity arises from the discrete, stochastic nature of biochemical reactions,…
Many organisms and cell types, from bacteria to cancer cells, exhibit a remarkable ability to adapt to fluctuating environments. Additionally, cells can leverage a memory of past environments to better survive previously-encountered…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…