Related papers: Bistable protein distributions in rod-shaped bacte…
Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…
We investigate a mechanism for the polar localization of proteins in bacteria. We focus on the MinCD/DivIVA system regulating division site placement in the rod-shaped bacterium Bacillus subtilis. Our model relies on a combination of…
Protein distributions measured under a broad set of conditions in bacteria and yeast were shown to exhibit a common skewed shape, with variances depending quadratically on means. For bacteria these properties were reproduced by temporal…
We study two mechanisms for the formation of protein patterns near membranes of living cells by mathematical modelling. Self-assembly of protein domains by electrostatic lipid-protein interactions is contrasted with self-organization due to…
Colonies of rod-shaped bacteria constitute a system of colloidal active matter with nematic properties. As a single initial bacterium multiplies through repeated divisions, the resulting colony quickly loses long-range orientational order,…
Various rod-shaped bacteria such as the canonical gram negative Escherichia coli or the well-studied gram positive Bacillus subtilis divide symmetrically after they approximately double their volume. Their size at division is not constant,…
Positioning of the midcell division plane within the bacterium E. coli is controlled by the min system of proteins: MinC, MinD and MinE. These proteins coherently oscillate from end to end of the bacterium. We present a reaction--diffusion…
Self-organization of proteins in space and time is of crucial importance for the functioning of cellular processes. Often, this organization takes place in the presence of strong random fluctuations due to the small number of molecules…
Inside individual cells, expression of genes is inherently stochastic and manifests as cell-to-cell variability or noise in protein copy numbers. Since proteins half-lives can be comparable to the cell-cycle length, randomness in…
Mechanical interactions among cells in a growing microbial colony can significantly influence the colony's spatial genetic structure and, thus, evolutionary outcomes such as the fates of rare mutations. Here, we computationally investigate…
Protein aggregation is of particular interest due to its connection with many diseases and disorders. Many factors can alter the dynamics and result of this process, one of them being the diffusivity of the monomers and aggregates in the…
In E. coli, accurate cell division depends upon the oscillation of Min proteins from pole to pole. We provide a model for the polar localization of MinD based only on diffusion, a delay for nucleotide exchange, and different rates of…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
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…
Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…
Protein concentration in a living cell fluctuates over time due to noise in growth and division processes. From extensive single-cell experiments by using E. coli strains with different promoter strength (over two orders of magnitude) and…
Cellular functions are established through biological evolution, but are constrained by the laws of physics. For instance, the physics of protein folding limits the lengths of cellular polypeptide chains. Consequently, many cellular…
The coarsening instability typically disrupts steady-state cluster-size distributions. We show that degradation coupled to the cluster size, such as arising from biological proteolysis, leads to a novel fixed-point cluster size. Stochastic…
Protein variability in single cells has been studied extensively in populations, but little is known about temporal protein fluctuations in a single cell over extended times. We present here traces of protein copy number measured in…
Bistability is considered wide-spread among bacteria and eukaryotic cells, useful e.g. for enzyme induction, bet hedging, and epigenetic switching. However, this phenomenon has mostly been described with deterministic dynamic or well-mixed…