Related papers: Can entropy save bacteria?
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
Colonies of rod-shaped bacteria constitute a system of colloidal active matter with nematic properties. As a single initial bacterium multiplies through repeated divisions, the resulting colony quickly loses long-range orientational order,…
Transcriptional activity has been shown to relate to the organization of chromosomes in the eukaryotic nucleus and in the bacterial nucleoid. In particular, highly transcribed genes, RNA polymerases and transcription factors gather into…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
The architecture of the eukaryotic genome is characterized by a high degree of spatial organization. Chromosomes occupy preferred territories correlated to their state of activity and, yet, displace their genes to interact with remote sites…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…
Chromatin is known to be organized into multiple domains of varying sizes and compaction. While these domains are often imagined as static structures, they are highly dynamic and show cell-to-cell variability. Since processes such as gene…
Cellular functions are established through biological evolution, but are constrained by the laws of physics. For instance, the physics of protein folding limits the lengths of cellular polypeptide chains. Consequently, many cellular…
Background: For faithful chromosome segregation during cell division, correct attachments must be established between sister chromosomes and microtubules from opposite spindle poles through kinetochores (chromosome bi-orientation).…
Cells regulate gene expression in part by forming DNA-protein condensates in the nucleus. While existing theories describe the equilibrium size and stability of such condensates, their dynamics remain less understood. Here, we use…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
A number of novel experimental and theoretical results have recently been obtained on active soft matter, demonstrating the various interesting universal and anomalous features of this kind of driven systems. Here we consider a fundamental…
During division it is of primary importance for a cell to correctly determine the site of cleavage. The bacterium Escherichia coli divides in the center, producing two daughter cells of equal size. Selection of the center as the correct…
Can topography be used to control bacteria accumulation? We address this question in the model system of smooth-swimming and run-and-tumble \textit{Escherichia coli} swimming near a sinusoidal surface, and show that the accumulation of…
Trapping macromolecules in nanopits finds multifarious applications in polymer separation, filtering biomolecules etc. However, tuning the locomotion of polymers in channels of nanoscopic dimensions is greatly restricted by the comparative…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
Replication through cell division is one of the most fundamental processes of life and a major driver of dynamics in systems ranging from bacterial colonies to embryogenesis, tissues and tumors. While regulation often plays a role in…
In previous works [physics/0204035, physics/0404052, physics/0509126] a procedure was described for dividing the $3 \times N$-dimensional conformational space of a molecular system into a number of discrete cells, this partition allowed the…
The entrapment of bacteria near boundary surfaces is of biological and practical importance, yet the underlying physics is still not well understood. We demonstrate that it is crucial to include a commonly neglected entropic effect arising…