Related papers: Signal transduction and directional sensing in euk…
In-vivo, cells are frequently exposed to multiple mechanical stimuli arising from the extracellular microenvironment, with deep impact on many biological functions. On the other hand, current methods for mechanobiology do not allow to…
This article reviews the mechanical bidomain model, a mathematical description how the extracellular matrix and intracellular cytoskeleton are coupled by integrin proteins. The fundamental hypothesis is that differences between…
Cell polarization requires redistribution of specific proteins to the nascent front and back of a eukarytotic cell. Among these proteins are Rac and Rho, members of the small GTPase family that regulate the actin cytoskeleton. Rac promotes…
Directional growth caused by gravitropism and corresponding bending of plant cells has been explored since 19th century, however, many aspects of mechanisms underlying the perception of gravity at the molecular level are still not well…
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…
Collective cell migration is crucial in many biological processes such as wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and tumor progression. The leading front of a collective migrating epithelial cell layer often destabilizes into multicellular…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
Hierarchically modular organization is a canonical network topology that is evolutionarily conserved in the nervous systems of animals. Within the network, neurons form directional connections defined by the growth of their axonal…
There is considerable evidence that action potentials are accompanied by "intrinsic optical signals", such as a nanometer-scale motion of the cell membrane. Here we present ChiSCAT, a technically simple imaging scheme that detects such…
Interactions between out-of-plane dipoles in bosonic gases enable the long-range propagation of excitons. The lack of direct control over collective dipolar properties has hitherto limited the degrees of tunability and the microscopic…
Push-pull networks are ubiquitous in signal transduction pathways in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. They allow cells to strongly amplify signals via the mechanism of zero-order ultrasensitivity. In a push-pull network, two…
The migration behavior of colliding cells is critically determined by transient contact-interactions. During these interactions, the motility machinery, including the front-rear polarization of the cell, dynamically responds to surface…
Interactions between crawling cells, which are essential for many biological processes, can be quantified by measuring cell-cell collisions. Conventionally, experiments of cell-cell collisions are conducted on two-dimensional flat…
Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…
All living cells interact dynamically with a constantly changing world. Eukaryotes in particular, evolved radically new ways to sense and react to their environment. These advances enabled new and more complex forms of cellular behavior in…
A general theoretical framework is put forth to organize and understand various observed phenomena and mathematical relationships in the field of molecular biology. By modeling each cell in eukaryotic organisms as a processor having a…
Collective cell responses to exogenous cues depend on cell-cell interactions. In principle, these can result in enhanced sensitivity to weak and noisy stimuli. However, this has not yet been shown experimentally, and, little is known about…
The interface dynamics of a 3D cell immersed in a 3D extracellular matrix is investigated. We suggest a 3D generalization of a known 2D minimal phase field model suggested in [1] for the description of keratocyte motility. Our model…
Cell migration is an indispensable physiological and pathological process for normal tissue development and cancer metastasis, which is greatly regulated by intracellular signal pathways and extracellular microenvironment (ECM). However,…
Signaling pathways serve to communicate information about extracellular conditions into the cell, to both the nucleus and cytoplasmic processes to control cell responses. Genetic mutations in signaling network components are frequently…