Related papers: Accuracy of direct gradient sensing by single cell…
In both biological and artificial systems, concentration gradients can serve as a convenient mechanism for manipulating particles and generating motility. Particles that interact with a solute will move along its gradient; if they…
Understanding the structure and dynamics of liquids is pivotal for the study of larger spatiotemporal processes, especially in glass-forming materials at low temperatures. Density scaling, observed in many molecular systems through…
Gas transport across cell membrane is a very important process in biochemistry which is essential for many crucial tasks, including cell respiration pH regulation in the cell. In the late 1990's, the suggestion that gasses are transported…
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…
Biomolecular condensates form on timescales of seconds in cells upon environmental or compositional changes. Condensate formation is thus argued to act as a mechanism for sensing such changes and quickly initiating downstream processes,…
The interacting lattice gas model is used to simulate fluid flow through an open percolating porous medium with the fluid entering at the source-end and leaving from the opposite end. The shape of the steady-state concentration profile and…
A wide array of biological systems can navigate in shallow gradients of chemoattractant with remarkable precision. Whilst previous approaches model such systems using coarse-grained chemical density profiles, we construct a dynamical model…
Mathematical models describing the spatial spreading and invasion of populations of biological cells are often developed in a continuum modelling framework using reaction-diffusion equations. While continuum models based on linear diffusion…
Concentration gradients play a critical role in embryogenesis, bacterial locomotion, as well as the motility of active particles. Particles develop concentration profiles around them by dissolution, adsorption, or the reactivity of surface…
Chemotactic cells establish cell polarity in the absence of external guidance cues. Such self-organized polarity is induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking in the intracellular activities, which produces an emergent memory effect…
The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine…
The first paper of this series [J. Chem. Phys. 158, 034103 (2023)] demonstrated that excess entropy scaling holds for both fine-grained and corresponding coarse-grained (CG) systems. Despite its universality, a more exact determination of…
We examine several conducting spheres moving through a magnetic field gradient. An analytical approximation is derived and an experiment is conducted to verify the analytical solution. The experiment is simulated as well to produce a…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
Single-cell organisms and various cell types use a range of motility modes when following a chemical gradient, but it is unclear which mode is best suited for different gradients. Here, we model directional decision-making in chemotactic…
Gradient, chemically modified, flat surfaces enable directed transport of droplets. Calculation of apparent contact angles inherent for gradient surfaces is challenging even for atomically flat ones. Wetting of gradient, flat solid surfaces…
The ultimate aspiration of any detection method is to achieve such a level of sensitivity that individual quanta of a measured value can be resolved. In the case of chemical sensors, the quantum is one atom or molecule. Such resolution has…
In high-contrast composite materials, the electric field concentration is a common phenomenon when two inclusions are close to touch. It is important from an engineering point of view to study the dependence of the electric field on the…
Spatially-explicit estimates of population density, together with appropriate estimates of uncertainty, are required in many management contexts. Density Surface Models (DSMs) are a two-stage approach for estimating spatially-varying…
Many motile biological cells navigate along concentration gradients of signaling molecules: This chemotaxis guides for instance sperm cells from marine invertebrates, which have to find egg cells in the ocean. While chemotaxis has been…