Related papers: Bistable protein distributions in rod-shaped bacte…
Experimental studies of cell motility in culture have shown that under adequate conditions these living organisms possess the ability to organize themselves into complex structures. Such structures may exhibit a synergy that greatly…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
BAR superfamily proteins have a banana-shaped domain that causes the local bending of lipid membranes. We study as to how such a local anisotropic curvature induces effective interaction between proteins and changes the global shape of…
One of the most important steps in the developmental process of the bacteria cell at the cellular level is the determination of the middle of the cell and the proper placement of the septum, these being essential to the division of the…
Protein pattern formation is essential for the spatial organization of many intracellular processes like cell division, flagellum positioning, and chemotaxis. A prominent example of intracellular patterns are the oscillatory pole-to-pole…
When it is polarised, a cell develops an asymmetric distribution of specific molecular markers, cytoskeleton and cell membrane shape. Polarisation can occur spontaneously or be triggered by external signals, like gradients of signalling…
Cell polarization underlies many cellular processes, such as differentiation, migration, and budding. Many living cells, such as budding yeast and fission yeast, use cytoskeletal structures to actively transport proteins to one location on…
Microtubules and motor proteins are building blocks of self-organized subcellular biological structures such as the mitotic spindle and the centrosomal microtubule array. These same ingredients can form new "bioactive" liquid-crystalline…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
A thin-walled tube, e.g., a drinking straw, manifests an instability when bent by localizing the curvature change in a small region. This instability has been extensively studied since the seminal work of Brazier nearly a century ago.…
Important cellular processes, such as cell motility and cell division, are coordinated by cell polarity, which is determined by the non-uniform distribution of certain proteins. Such protein patterns form via an interplay of protein…
Our understanding of cell division control in bacteria still relies largely on interpreting correlations between phenomenological variables, with limited connection to the underlying molecular mechanisms. Here, we analytically solve a…
We propose a model for cell polarization as a response to an external signal which results in a system of PDEs for different variants of a protein on the cell surface and interior respectively. We study stationary states of this model in…
Delay is an inherent feature of genetic regulatory networks. It represents the time required for the assembly of functional regulator proteins. The protein production process is complex, as it includes transcription, translocation,…
To model the morphogenesis of rod-shaped bacterial micro-colony, several individual-based models have been proposed in the biophysical literature. When studying the shape of micro-colonies, most models present interaction forces such as…
Non-motile elongated bacteria confined in two-dimensional open micro-channels can exhibit collective motion and form dense monolayers with nematic order if the cells proliferate, i.e., grow and divide. Using soft molecular dynamics…
During migration cells exhibit a rich variety of seemingly random migration patterns, which makes unraveling the underlying mechanisms that control cell migration a daunting challenge. For efficient migration cells require a mechanism for…
Diffusion of tracer particles in the cytoplasm of mammalian cells is often anomalous with a marked heterogeneity even within individual particle trajectories. Despite considerable efforts, the mechanisms behind these observations have…
Natural protein sequences that self-assemble to form globular structures are compact with high packing densities in the folded states. It is known that proteins unfold upon addition of denaturants, adopting random coil structures. The…
We investigate the collective behavior of motile rods immersed in a monolayer of apolar rods confined between vertically vibrating plates using numerical simulations. We uncover an antidiffusive instability whereby motile rods segregate…