Related papers: Signal transduction and directional sensing in euk…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
Motility initiation in crawling cells requires transformation of a symmetric state into a polarized state. In contrast, motility arrest is associated with re-symmetrization of the internal configuration of a cell. Experiments on keratocytes…
Many physiological phenomena involve directional cell migration. It is usually attributed to chemical gradients in vivo. Recently, other cues have been shown to guide cells in vitro, including stiffness/adhesion gradients or micro-patterned…
A large number of eukaryotic cells are able to directly detect external chemical gradients with great accuracy and the ultimate limit to their sensitivity has been a topic of debate for many years. Previous work has been done to understand…
In this study, we explored the utility of a descriptive and predictive bionetwork model for phospholipase C-coupled calcium signaling pathways, built with non-kinetic experimental information. Boolean models generated from these data yield…
Cells use temporal dynamical patterns to transmit information via signaling pathways. As optimality with respect to the environment plays a fundamental role in biological systems, organisms have evolved optimal ways to transmit information.…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
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…
Cells frequently employ extracellular vesicles, or exosomes, to signal across long distances and coordinate collective actions. Exosomes diffuse slowly, can be actively degraded, and contain stochastic amounts of molecular cargo. These…
Many cells use calcium signalling to carry information from the extracellular side of the plasma membrane to targets in their interior. Since virtually all cells employ a network of biochemical reactions for Ca2+ signalling, much effort has…
Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not completely understood. We consider simplified models for…
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…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
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…
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…
The polarisation of cells and tissues is fundamental for tissue morphogenesis during biological development and regeneration. A deeper understanding of biological polarity pattern formation can be gained from the consideration of pattern…
Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…
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…
Directional chemosensing is ubiquitous in cell biology, but some cells such as mating yeast paradoxically degrade the signal they aim to detect. While the data processing inequality suggests that such signal modification cannot increase the…