Related papers: PAKing up to the endothelium
Angiogenesis is the complex process by which new blood vessels develop from an existing vasculature in order to supply nutrients and/or metabolites to tissues, playing a fundamental role in many physiological and pathological conditions…
Interruptions in nonlinear wave propagation, commonly referred to as wave breaks, are typical of many complex excitable systems. In the heart they lead to fatal rhythm disorders, the so-called arrhythmias, which are one of the main causes…
Endothelial cells are responsible for the formation of the capillary blood vessel network. We describe a system of endothelial cells by means of two-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of point-like particles. Cells' motion is…
Notch signaling is an evolutionary conserved cell-cell communication pathway. Besides regulating cell-fate decisions at an individual cell level, Notch signaling coordinates the emergent spatiotemporal patterning in a tissue through…
Controlling growth via cell division is crucial in the development of higher organisms, and yet the mechanisms through which this is achieved, e.g., in epithelial tissue, is not yet fully understood. We show that by coupling the cell cycle…
Droplets are essential for spatially controlling biomolecules in cells. To work properly, cells need to control the emergence and morphology of droplets. On the one hand, driven chemical reactions can affect droplets profoundly. For…
This paper deals with a model of cellular growth called "Epigenetic Tracking", whose key features are: i) distinction bewteen "normal" and "driver" cells; ii) presence in driver cells of an epigenetic memory, that holds the position of the…
This paper describes a 2D particle system in which autopoietic vesicles that are able to grow, repair, and reproduce can emerge from an initial random distribution of individual components. The reproduction process also exhibits inheritance…
We study a minimal model of a crawling eukaryotic cell with a chemical polarity controlled by a reaction-diffusion mechanism describing Rho GTPase dynamics. The size, shape, and speed of the cell emerge from the combination of the chemical…
Internet, social media, neuronal or blood vessel are organized in complex networks. These networks are characterized by several quantities such as the underlying graph connectivity (topology), how they grow in time, scaling laws or by the…
A central challenge in modeling neurodegenerative diseases is connecting cellular-level mechanisms to tissue-level pathology, in particular to determine whether pathology is driven primarily by cell-autonomous triggers or by propagation…
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) may cause severe loss of vision or blindness particularly in elderly people. Exudative AMD is characterized by angiogenesis of blood vessels growing from underneath the macula, crossing the…
An endogenous molecular-cellular network for both normal and abnormal functions is assumed to exist. This endogenous network forms a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system, with many stable attractors in its functional landscape. Normal or…
A coupled system of nonlinear mixed-type equations modeling early stages of angiogenesis is analyzed in a bounded domain. The system consists of stochastic differential equations describing the movement of the positions of the tip and stalk…
Atherosclerosis is characterised by the growth of fatty plaques in the inner (intimal) layer of the artery wall. In mature plaques, vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) are recruited from the adjacent medial layer to deposit a cap of fibrous…
The formation of gaps in the endothelium is a crucial process underlying both cancer and immune cell extravasation, contributing to the functioning of the immune system during infection, the unfavorable development of chronic inflammation…
Understanding disease progression at the molecular pathway level usually requires capturing both structural dependencies between pathways and the temporal dynamics of disease evolution. In this work, we solve the former challenge by…
When modeling of tumor-driven angiogenesis, a major source of analytical and computational complexity is the strong coupling between the kinetic parameters of the relevant stochastic branching-and-growth of the capillary network, and the…
Neovascularisation is essential for tissue development and regeneration, in addition to playing a key role in pathological settings such as ischemia and tumour development. Experimental findings in the past two decades have led to the…
Cells often exhibit different and stable phenotypes from the same DNA sequence. Robustness and plasticity of such cellular states are controlled by diverse transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms, among them the modification of…