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Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
Fundamental mechanisms governing cell size control and homeostasis are still poorly understood. The relationship between sizes at division and birth in single cells is used as a metric to categorize the basis of size homeostasis [1-3].…
We study the noise characteristics of stochastic oscillations in protein number dynamics of simple genetic oscillatory systems. Using the three-component negative feedback transcription regulatory system called the repressilator as a…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…
Isogenic Escherichia coli growing exponentially in a constant environment display large variation in growth-rates, division-sizes and generation-times. It is unclear how these seemingly random cell cycles can be reconciled with the precise…
During division it is of primary importance for a cell to correctly determine the site of cleavage. The bacterium Escherichia coli divides in the center, producing two daughter cells of equal size. Selection of the center as the correct…
Collective behavior of proteins on biomembranes is usually studied within the spontaneous curvature model. Here we consider an alternative phenomenological approach, which accounts consistently for partial ordering of proteins as well as…
We examine fluctuation effects due to the low copy number of proteins involved in pattern-forming dynamics within a bacterium. We focus on a stochastic model of the oscillating MinCDE protein system regulating accurate cell division in E.…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…
Studies on the role of fluctuations in signal propagation and on gene regulation in monoclonal bacterial population have been extensively pursued based on the machinery of two-component system. The bacterial two-component system shows noise…
Rippling patterns of myxobacteria appear in starving colonies before they aggregate to form fruiting bodies. These periodic traveling cell density waves arise from the coordination of individual cell reversals, resulting from an internal…
Vibrational spectra of proteins and topologically disordered solids display a common anomaly at low frequencies, known as Boson peak. We show that such feature in globular proteins can be deciphered in terms of an energy landscape picture,…
Proteins must fold quickly to acquire their biologically functional three-dimensional native structures. Hence, these are mainly stabilized by local contacts, while intricate topologies such as knots are rare. Here, we reveal the existence…
Self-assembly of proteins is a biological phenomenon which gives rise to spontaneous formation of amyloid fibrils or polymers. The starting point of this phase, called nucleation exhibits an important variability among replicated…
Dense packing of hydrophobic residues in the cores of globular proteins determines their stability. Recently, we have shown that protein cores possess packing fraction $\phi \approx 0.56$, which is the same as dense, random packing of amino…
Expression of many genes varies as a cell transitions through different cell-cycle stages. How coupling between stochastic expression and cell cycle impacts cell-to-cell variability (noise) in the level of protein is not well understood. We…
Cued and un-cued cell polarization is a fundamental mechanism in cell biology. As an alternative to the classical Turing bifurcation, it has been proposed that the cell polarity might onset by means of the well-known phenomenon of…
In permissive environments, E. coli can double its dry mass every 21 minutes. During this time, ribosomes, RNA polymerases, and the proteome are all doubled. Yet, the question of how to relate bacterial doubling time to other biologically…
We examine the interactions between actively rotating proteins moving in a membrane. Experimental evidence suggests that such rotor proteins, like the ATP synthases of the inner mitochondrial membrane, can arrange themselves into lattices.…