Related papers: Bcl-2 family controls mitochondrial outer membrane…
The so-called Mixed Feedback Loop (MFL) is a small two-gene network where protein A regulates the transcription of protein B and the two proteins form a heterodimer. It has been found to be statistically over-represented in statistical…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
Protein mechanosensitive channels (MS) are activated by tension transmitted through the lipid bilayer. We propose a theory of lateral stress relaxation in a bilayer lipid membrane exposed to external pressure pulse in the patch-clamp…
A microscopic mechanism of low-pressure insertion and separation of chain-like molecules in host matrices is proposed. It is shown that the intramolecular correlations combined to appropriate host activities are responsible for a…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
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…
We present a systematic study of the influence of cell geometry on the orientational distribution of microtubules (MTs) nucleated from a single microtubule organizing center (MTOC). For simplicity we consider an elliptical cell geometry, a…
Death ligand mediated apoptotic activation is a mode of programmed cell death that is widely used in cellular and physiological situations. Interest in studying death ligand induced apoptosis has increased due to the promising role of…
Directed collective cell migration is central in morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer progression1,2. Although it is well-accepted that the molecular anisotropy of the micro-environment guides this migration3,4, its impact on the pattern…
Cell migration is a fundamental process underlying the survival and function of both unicellular and multicellular organisms. Crawling motility in eukaryotic cells arises from cyclic protrusion and retraction driven by the cytoskeleton,…
A network of semiflexible biopolymers, known as the cytoskeleton, and molecular motors play fundamental mechanical roles in cellular activities. The cytoskeletal response to forces generated by molecular motors is profoundly linked to…
Cellular cortex, which is a highly viscous thin cytoplasmic layer just below the cell membrane, controls the cell's mechanical properties, which can be characterized by a hydrodynamic length scale $\ell$. Cells actively regulate $\ell$ via…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
Metabolic substrates, such as oxygen and glucose, are rapidly delivered to the cell through filtration across microvessels walls. Modelling this important process is complicated by the coupling between flow and transport equations, which…
Live cells have ambiguous mechanical properties. They were often described as either elastic solids or viscoelastic fluids and have recently been classified as soft glassy materials characterized by weak power-law rheology. Nonlinear…
Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML) is a blood-derived proliferative disorder, which is highly associated to a translocation of chromosomes 9 and 22 or the creation of Philadelphia chromosome Ph(+) cases, inducing the synthesis of a chimeric…
The galactose network is a complex system responsible for galactose metabolism. It has been extensively studied experimentally and mathematically at the unicellular level to broaden our understanding of its regulatory mechanisms at higher…
Unstructured proteins can modulate cellular responses to environmental conditions by undergoing coil-globule transitions and phase separation. However, the molecular mechanisms of these phenomena still need to be fully understood. Here, we…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Cell migration is a fundamental process involved in physiological phenomena such as the immune response and morphogenesis, but also in pathological processes, such as the development of tumor metastasis. These functions are effectively…