Related papers: Universal features of cell polarization processes
Several cellular activities, such as directed cell migration, are coordinated by an intricate network of biochemical reactions which lead to a polarised state of the cell, in which cellular symmetry is broken, causing the cell to have a…
The combination of protrusions and retractions in the movement of polarized cells leads to understand the effect of possible synchronisation between the two ends of the cells. This synchronisation, in turn, could lead to different dynamics…
Ionic crystals, such as solid electrolytes and complex oxides, are central to modern technologies for energy storage, sensing, actuation, and other functional applications. An important fundamental issue in the atomic and quantum-scale…
Protein pattern formation is essential for the spatial organization of many intracellular processes like cell division, flagellum positioning, and chemotaxis. A prominent example of intracellular patterns are the oscillatory pole-to-pole…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…
In metazoans, cells collectively polarize and align along the tissue plane. This phenomenon is called Planar cell polarity (PCP). Polarization means asymmetric segregation of molecules and sub-cellular structures within a cell. In PCP,…
Cell polarization is a critical process that separates molecular species into two distinct regions in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, guiding biological processes such as cell division and cell differentiation. Although several underlying…
All cells must keep time to consistently perform vital biological functions. To that end, the coupling and interrelatedness of diverse subsecond events in the complex cellular environment, such as protein folding or translation rates,…
Cells coexist together in colonies or as tissues. Their behaviour is controlled by an interplay between intercellular forces and biochemical regulation. We develop a simple model of the cell cycle, the fundamental regulatory network…
Cells adapt to different conditions by altering a vast number of components, which is measurable using transcriptome analysis. Given that a cell undergoing steady growth is constrained to sustain each of its internal components, the…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…
A theoretical study of cell evolution is presented here. By using a toolbox containing an intracellular catalytic reaction network model and a mutation-selection process, four distinct phases of self-organization were unveiled. First, the…
Phase separation is not only ubiquitous in diverse physical systems, but also plays an important organizational role inside biological cells. However, experimental studies of intracellular condensates (drops with condensed concentrations of…
Classical electrodynamics uses a dielectric constant to describe the polarization response of electromechanical systems to changes in an electric field. We generalize that description to include a wide variety of responses to changes in the…
Molecular sorting is a fundamental process that allows eukaryotic cells to distill and concentrate specific chemical factors in appropriate cell membrane subregions, thus endowing them with different chemical identities and functional…
Many processes in eukaryotic cells, including cell motility, rely on the growth of branched actin networks from surfaces. Despite its central role the mechano-chemical coupling mechanisms which guide the growth process are poorly…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
Cell polarization and directional cell migration can display random, persistent and oscillatory dynamic patterns. However, it is not clear if these polarity patterns can be explained by the same underlying regulatory mechanism. Here, we…