Related papers: A symmetry breaking mechanism for epithelial cell …
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…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
Eukaryotic cells possess a sensible chemical compass allowing them to orient toward sources of soluble chemicals. The extracellular chemical signal triggers separation of the cell membrane into two domains populated by different…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
Cell polarization underlies many cellular processes, such as differentiation, migration, and budding. Many living cells, such as budding yeast and fission yeast, use cytoskeletal structures to actively transport proteins to one location on…
A cell is polarised when it has developed a main axis of organisation through the reorganisation of its cytosqueleton and its intracellular organelles. Polarisation can occur spontaneously or be triggered by external signals, like gradients…
We propose a model for cell polarization as a response to an external signal which results in a system of PDEs for different variants of a protein on the cell surface and interior respectively. We study stationary states of this model in…
When it is polarised, a cell develops an asymmetric distribution of specific molecular markers, cytoskeleton and cell membrane shape. Polarisation can occur spontaneously or be triggered by external signals, like gradients of signalling…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
Cell polarization plays a central role in the development of complex organisms. It has been recently shown that cell polarization may follow from the proximity to a phase separation instability in a bistable network of chemical reactions.…
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…
Cued and un-cued cell polarization is a fundamental mechanism in cell biology. As an alternative to the classical Turing bifurcation, it has been proposed that the cell polarity might onset by means of the well-known phenomenon of…
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…
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…
Cellular differentiation in a developping organism is studied via a discrete bistable reaction-diffusion model. A system of undifferentiated cells is allowed to receive an inductive signal emenating from its environment. Depending on the…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
The motion of a eukaryotic cell presents a variety of interesting and challenging problems from both a modeling and a computational perspective. The processes span many spatial scales (from molecular to tissue) as well as disparate time…
Ordered polarity alignment of a cell population plays a vital role in biology, such as in hair follicle alignment and asymmetric cell division. Here, we propose a theoretical framework for the understanding of generic dynamical properties…