Related papers: Can entropy save bacteria?
We propose a new method for electrophoretic separation of DNA in which adsorbed polymers are driven over a disordered two-dimensional substrate which contains attractive sites for the polymers. Using simulations of a model for long polymer…
Chlamydiae are bacteria with an interesting unusual developmental cycle. A single bacterium in its infectious form (elementary body, EB) enters the host cell, where it converts into its dividing form (reticulate body, RB), and divides by…
We investigate the dynamics of a colony of crawling, proliferating cells with a minimal, mechanical cell model. The cells consist of two disks, modelling the cell body and a pseudopod, connected by a finite extensible spring. The cells…
Active transport of biomolecular condensates and cell migration in collectives are fundamental to development, homeostasis, and processes such as cancer progression, wound healing, and infection response. Yet how these assemblies are…
Fluid flow has a major effect on the aggregation and fragmentation of bacterial colonies. Yet, a generic framework to understand and predict how hydrodynamics affects colony size remains elusive. This study investigates how fluid flow…
We introduce a simple physical picture to explain the process of molecular sorting, whereby specific proteins are concentrated and distilled into submicrometric lipid vesicles in eukaryotic cells. To this purpose, we formulate a model based…
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…
The chromatin folding and the spatial arrangement of chromosomes in the cell play a crucial role in DNA replication and genes expression. An improper chromatin folding could lead to malfunctions and, over time, diseases. For eukaryotes,…
Colloid or nanoparticle mobility under confinement is of central importance to a wide range of physical and biological processes. Here, we introduce a minimal model of particles in a hydrodynamic continuum to examine how particle shape and…
Prokaryotes do not make use of a nucleus membrane to segregate their genetic material from the cytoplasm, so that their nucleoid is potentially free to explore the whole volume of the cell. Nonetheless, high resolution images of bacteria…
The homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
We study a generic model of self-assembling chains which can branch and form networks with branching points (junctions) of arbitrary functionality. The physical realizations include physical gels, wormlike micells, dipolar fluids and…
By observing reconstituted chromatin by fluorescence microscopy (FM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), we found that the density of nucleosomes exhibits a bimodal profile, i.e., there is a large transition between the dense and dispersed…
Densely packed, motile bacteria can adopt collective states not seen in conventional, passive materials. These states remain in many ways mysterious, and their physical characterization can aid our understanding of natural bacterial…
Bacteria and archaea have evolved an adaptive, heritable immune system that recognizes and protects against viruses or plasmids. This system, known as the CRISPR-Cas system, allows the host to recognize and incorporate short foreign DNA or…
Isologous diversification theory for cell differentiation is proposed, based on simulations of interacting cells with biochemical networks and cell division process following consumption of some chemicals. According to the simulations of…
Whereas entropy can induce phase behavior that is as rich as seen in energetic systems, microphase separation remains a very rare phenomenon in entropic systems. In this paper, we present a density functional approach to study the…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
Proteins are essential components of living systems, capable of performing a huge variety of tasks at the molecular level, such as recognition, signalling, copy, transport, ... The protein sequences realizing a given function may largely…
The bacterial genome is organized in a structure called the nucleoid by a variety of associated proteins. These proteins can form complexes on DNA that play a central role in various biological processes, including chromosome segregation. A…