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Laboratory experiments with bacterial colonies, under well-controlled conditions often lead to evolutionary diversification, where at least two ecotypes emerge from an initially monomorphic population. Empirical evidence suggests that such…
Regulation of cell growth and division is essential to achieve cell-size homeostasis. Recent advances in imaging technologies, such as ``mother machines" for bacteria or yeast, have allowed long-term tracking of cell-size dynamics across…
Cell proliferation and cell movement are fundamentally stochastic processes which lead to variability in the growth and spatial structure of cell populations in many biological settings, such as cell invasion, wound healing, and tumour…
The mechanism and driving forces of chromosome segregation in the bacterial cell cycle of E. coli is one of the least understood events in its life cycle. Using principles of entropic repulsion between polymer loops confined in a cylinder,…
Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…
Bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) exhibit biased motion if kept in a spatially non-uniform chemical environment. Here, we bring out unique time-dependent characteristics of bacterial chemotaxis, in response to a diffusing spatial…
The variability in cell size of an isogenic population of Escherichia coli has been widely reported in experiment. The probability density function (PDF) of cell lengths has been variously described by exponential and lognormal functions.…
Two powerful and complementary experimental approaches are commonly used to study the cell cycle and cell biology: One class of experiments characterizes the statistics (or demographics) of an unsynchronized exponentially-growing…
We propose a simple discrete stochastic model for calcium dynamics in living cells. Specifically, the calcium concentration distribution is assumed to give rise to a set of probabilities for the opening/closing of channels which release…
We investigate the profound relation between the equations of biological evolution and quantum mechanics by writing a biologically inspired equation for the stochastic dynamics of an ensemble of particles. Interesting behavior is observed…
Recently several authors studied the segregation of particles for a system composed of mono-dispersed inelastic spheres contained in a box divided by a wall in the middle. The system exhibited a symmetry breaking leading to an…
We investigate a mechanism for the polar localization of proteins in bacteria. We focus on the MinCD/DivIVA system regulating division site placement in the rod-shaped bacterium Bacillus subtilis. Our model relies on a combination of…
This work proposes stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) as a practical tool to replicate clustering effects of more detailed particle-based dynamics. Inspired by membrane-mediated receptor dynamics on cell surfaces, we…
It has been recently shown that the exponential growth rate of a population of bacterial cells starting from a single cell shows transient oscillations due to early synchronized bursts of division. These oscillations are enhanced by cell…
Intracellular transport processes are essential to the healthy development of many organisms as well as more generally to healthy cellular function. The complex dynamics and interactions between protein molecules and filaments on different…
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…
We study time continuous branching processes with exponentially distributed lifetimes, with two types of cells that proliferate according to binary fission. A range of possible system dynamics are considered, each of which is characterized…
We study a model of rolling particles subject to stochastic fluctuations, which may be relevant in systems of nano- or micro-scale particles where rolling is an approximation for strong static friction. We consider the simplest possible…
We study the dynamics of waves, oscillations, and other spatio-temporal patterns in stochastic evolution systems, including SPDE and stochastic integral equations. Representing a given pattern as a smooth, stable invariant manifold of the…
Recent imaging data for single bacterial cells reveal that their mean sizes grow exponentially in time and that their size distributions collapse to a single curve when rescaled by their means. An analogous result holds for the…