Related papers: Noisy-threshold control of cell death
The diversity of cell populations is regulated by extracellular and intracellular variability. The latter includes genetic, epigenetic and stochastic variability, all contributing to the experimentally observed heterogeneity in response to…
The process of programmed cell death, namely apoptosis, is a natural mechanism that regulates healthy tissue, multicellular structures, and homeostasis. An improved understanding of apoptosis can significantly enhance our knowledge of…
Tumor development is characterized by a compromised balance between cell life and death decision mechanisms, which are tighly regulated in normal cells. Understanding this process provides insights for developing new treatments for fighting…
Cancer invasion and metastasis depend on angiogenesis. The cellular processes (growth, migration, and apoptosis) that occur during angiogenesis are tightly regulated by signaling molecules. Thus, understanding how cells synthesize multiple…
Apoptosis is an important area of research because of its role in keeping a mature multicellular organism's number of cells constant hence, ensuring that the organism does not have cell accumulation that may transform into cancer with…
Selective control in a population is the ability to control a member of the population while leaving the other members relatively unaffected. The concept of selective control is developed using cell death or apoptosis in heterogeneous cell…
Cancer cells are widely known to be protected from apoptosis, which is a major hurdle to successful anti-cancer therapy. Over-expression of several anti-apoptotic proteins, or mutations in pro-apoptotic factors, has been recognized to…
Fractional killing in response to drugs is a hallmark of non-genetic cellular heterogeneity. Yet how individual lineages evade drug treatment, as observed in bacteria and cancer cells, is not quantitatively understood. We analyse a…
Tumor Necrosis Factor alpha (TNF) initiates a complex series of biochemical events in the cell upon binding to its type R1 receptor (TNF-R1). Recent experimental work has unravelled the molecular regulation of the recruitment of initial…
Noise caused by fluctuations at the molecular level is a fundamental part of intracellular processes. While the response of biological systems to noise has been studied extensively, there has been limited understanding of how to exploit it…
Autophagy is a conserved biological stress response in mammalian cells that is responsible for clearing damaged proteins and organelles from the cytoplasm and recycling their contents via the lysosomal pathway. In cases of mild stress,…
Variability in the tumorigenic potential among cancer cells within a tumor population is an unresolved fundamental issue in cancer biology. It is important to know whether cancer cells with higher tumorigenic potential, such as cancer stem…
Apoptosis is a mechanism of programmed cell death in which cells engage in a controlled demolition and prepare to be digested without damaging their environment. In normal conditions apoptosis is repressed, until it is irreversibly induced…
BH3 mimetics have been proposed as new anticancer therapeutics. They target anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins, up-regulation of which has been implicated in the resistance of many cancer cells, particularly leukemia and lymphoma cells, to…
Classic models of cell size control consider cells divide while reaching a threshold, e.g. size, age, or size extension. The molecular basis of the threshold involves multiple layers of regulation as well as gene noises. In this work, we…
Intracellular networks process cellular-level information and control cell fate. They can be computationally modeled using Boolean networks, which are implicit-time causal models of discrete binary events. These networks can be embedded in…
Apoptosis is a highly regulated cell death mechanism involved in many physiological processes. A key component of extrinsically activated apoptosis is the death receptor Fas, which, on binding to its cognate ligand FasL, oligomerize to form…
Understanding deaths and life-death boundaries of cells is a fundamental challenge in biological sciences. In this study, we present a theoretical framework for investigating cell death. We conceptualize cell death as a controllability…
Cells control their size to cope with noise during growth and division. Eukaryotic cells exhibiting "sizer" control (targeting a specific size before dividing) may rely on molecular concentration thresholds, but simple implementations of…
We analyze and reinterpret experimental evidence from the literature to argue for an ability of tumor cells to self-regulate their aneuploidy rate. We conjecture that this ability is mediated by a diversification factor that exploits…