Related papers: Bistable protein distributions in rod-shaped bacte…
We derive exact solutions of simplified models for the temporal evolution of the protein concentration within a cell population arbitrarily far from the stationary state. We show that monitoring the dynamics can assist in modeling and…
We study the statistical properties of hydrophobic/polar model sequences with unique native states on the square lattice. It is shown that this ensemble of sequences differs from random sequences in significant ways in terms of both the…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
Vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers exhibit a wide diversity of behavior upon electroporation, due to competitions between edge, surface and bending energies that drive the system, while different viscous dissipation…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
We consider the dynamics of a population of organisms containing two mutually inhibitory gene regulatory networks, that can result in a bistable switch-like behaviour. We completely characterize their local and global dynamics in the…
We study the behavior of negatively charged colloids with two positively charged polar caps close to a planar patterned surface. The competition between the different anisotropic components of the particle-particle interaction patterns is…
Engineered bacteria in which motility is reduced by local cell density generate periodic stripes of high and low density when spotted on agar plates. We study theoretically the origin and mechanism of this process in a kinetic model that…
The assembly of banana-shaped rodlike proteins on membranes, and the associated membrane shape transformations, are investigated by analytical theory and coarse-grained simulations. The membrane-mediated interactions between two…
Studies of how protein fold have shown that the way protein clumps form in the test tube is similar to how proteins form the so-called ``amyloid'' deposits that are the pathological signal of a variety of diseases, among them the memory…
At the one-cell stage, the C. elegans embryo becomes polarized along the anterior-posterior axis. The PAR proteins form complementary anterior and posterior domains in a dynamic process driven by cytoskeletal rearrangement. Initially, the…
Recent experiments have illuminated a remarkable growth mechanism of rod-shaped bacteria: proteins associated with cell wall extension move at constant velocity in circles oriented approximately along the cell circumference (Garner et al.,…
Polar polymer activity is a fundamental mechanism behind a large number of cellular dynamical processes. The number and location of the active sites on the polymer backbone play a central role in their dynamics and conformational…
In E. coli the determination of the middle of the cell and the proper placement of the septum is essential to the division of the cell. This step depends on the proteins MinC, MinD, and MinE. Exposure to a constant external field e.g., an…
The functionality of proteins is related to their structure in the native state. Protein structures are made up of emergent building blocks of helices and almost planar sheets. A simple coarse-grained geometrical model of a flexible tube…
The Min system in Escherichia coli directs division to the centre of the cell through pole-to-pole oscillations of the MinCDE proteins. We present a one dimensional stochastic model of these oscillations which incorporates membrane…
Gene expression is inherently noisy, posing a challenge to understanding how precise and reproducible patterns of gene expression emerge in mammals. We investigate this phenomenon using gastruloids, an in vitro model for early mammalian…
Periodic reversals of the direction of motion in systems of self-propelled rod shaped bacteria enable them to effectively resolve traffic jams formed during swarming and maximize their swarming rate. In this paper, a connection is found…
The bipolar organization of the microtubule-based mitotic spindle is essential for the faithful segregation of chromosomes in cell division. Despite our extensive knowledge of genes and proteins, the physical mechanism of how the ensemble…
The plane of bacterial cell division must be precisely positioned. In the bacterium Myxococcus xanthus, the proteins PomX and PomY form a large cluster, which is tethered to the nucleoid by the ATPase PomZ and moves in a stochastic, but…