Related papers: Accuracy of direct gradient sensing by single cell…
Biomolecular condensates help organize the cell cytoplasm and nucleoplasm into spatial compartments with different chemical compositions. A key feature of such compositional patterning is the local enrichment of enzymatically active…
Berg and Purcell [Biophys. J. 20, 193 (1977)] calculated how the accuracy of concentration sensing by single-celled organisms is limited by noise from the small number of counted molecules. Here we generalize their results to the sensing of…
We discovered a class of self-similar solutions in nonlinear models describing the formation of morphogen gradients, the concentration fields of molecules acting as spatial regulators of cell differention in developing tissues. These models…
The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realise that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or…
Self-generated gradients have atttracted a lot of attention in the recent biological literature. It is considered as a robust strategy for a group of cells to find its way during a long journey. This note is intended to discuss various…
We address the problem of sensing the curvature of a manifold by performing measurements on a particle constrained to the manifold itself. In particular, we consider situations where the dynamics of the particle is quantum mechanical and…
Molecular adsorption on surfaces plays a central role in catalysis, corrosion, desalination, and many other processes of relevance to industry and the natural world. Few adsorption systems are more ubiquitous or of more widespread…
We investigate the transport and adsorption of solutes within graded porous filters characterised by a spatially varying microstructure. While classical homogenisation theory typically assumes periodic media, we employ the method of…
Autologous chemotaxis, in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow, is thwarted at high cell density because molecules from other cells interfere with a given cell's signal. Using a minimal model of…
In this paper, optimal control problems governed by diffusion equations with Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions are investigated in the framework of the gradient discretisation method. Gradient schemes are defined for the optimality…
Ephemeral aggregations of bacteria are ubiquitous in the environment, where they serve as hotbeds of metabolic activity, nutrient cycling, and horizontal gene transfer. In many cases, these regions of high bacterial concentration are…
Cellular nutrient consumption is influenced by both the nutrient uptake kinetics of an individual cell and the cells' spatial arrangement. Large cell clusters or colonies have inhibited growth at the cluster's center due to the shielding of…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
We propose a new type of effective densities via the potential distribution theorem. These densities are for the sake of enabling the mapping of the free energy of a uniform fluid onto that of a nonuniform fluid. The potential distribution…
A fundamental function of cortical circuits is the integration of information from different sources to form a reliable basis for behavior. While animals behave as if they optimally integrate information according to Bayesian probability…
Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…
Displacement detection of a sphere particle in focused laser beams with quadrant photodetector (QPD) provides a fast and high precision way to determine the particle location. In contrast to the traditional Gaussian beams, the sensitivity…
We study the drag on a centimetric sphere in a uniform flow in the presence of a free surface as a function of submergence depth. Through direct force measurements in a custom benchtop recirculating flume, we demonstrate that the drag can…
Metastasis is a process of cell migration that can be collective and guided by chemical cues. Viewing metastasis in this way, as a physical phenomenon, allows one to draw upon insights from other studies of collective sensing and migration…
The "chemical bond" is a central concept in molecular sciences, but there is no consensus as to what a bond actually is. Therefore, a variety of bonding models have been developed, each defining the structure of molecules in a different…