Related papers: Bistable protein distributions in rod-shaped bacte…
In metazoans, cells collectively polarize and align along the tissue plane. This phenomenon is called Planar cell polarity (PCP). Polarization means asymmetric segregation of molecules and sub-cellular structures within a cell. In PCP,…
How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive…
We characterize cell motion in experiments and show that the transition to collective motion in colonies of gliding bacterial cells confined to a monolayer appears through the organization of cells into larger moving clusters. Collective…
We propose a model that explains the hierarchical organization of proteins in fold families. The model, which is based on the evolutionary selection of proteins by their native state stability, reproduces patterns of amino acids conserved…
Knots are abundant in globular homopolymers but rare in globular proteins. To shed new light on this long-standing conundrum, we study the influence of sequence on the formation of knots in proteins under native conditions within the…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
Gene products (RNAs, proteins) often occur at low molecular counts inside individual cells, and hence are subject to considerable random fluctuations (noise) in copy number over time. Not surprisingly, cells encode diverse regulatory…
Recent experiments suggest that the interplay between cells and the mechanics of their substrate gives rise to a diversity of morphological and migrational behaviors. Here, we develop a Cellular Potts Model of polarizing cells on a…
In growing active matter systems, a large collection of engineered or living autonomous units metabolize free energy and create order at different length scales as they proliferate and migrate collectively. One such example is bacterial…
Variations of transport efficiency in structured environments between distinct individuals in actively self-propelled systems is both hard to study and poorly understood. Here, we study the transport of a non-tumbling {\ecoli} strain, an…
Polypeptides can self-assemble into hierarchically organized fibrils consisting of a stack of individually folded polypeptides driven together by hydrophobic interaction. Using a coarse grained model, we systematically studied this…
One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…
The role of activity on the hydrodynamic dispersion of bacteria in a model porous medium is studied by tracking thousands of bacteria in a microfluidic chip containing randomly placed pillars. We first evaluate the spreading dynamics of two…
Emergence of regular spatial patterns is a hallmark in living matter ranging from subcellular organelles to developing embryos and to ecosystems. Mechanisms for the formation of ordered spatial patterns in biology often require chemical…
Cell membranes are out of thermodynamic equilibrium notably because of membrane recycling, i.e. active exchange of material with the cytosol. We propose an analytically tractable model of biomembrane predicting the effects of recycling on…
Understanding flow and transport of bacteria in porous media is crucial to technologies such as bioremediation, biomineralization or enhanced oil recovery. While physicochemical bacteria filtration is well-documented, recent studies showed…
Within individual bacteria, we combine force-dependent polymerization dynamics of individual MreB protofilaments with an elastic model of protofilament bundles buckled into helical configurations. We use variational techniques and…
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
The persistent motion of bacteria produces clusters with a stationary cluster size distribution (CSD). Here we develop a minimal model for bacteria in a narrow channel to assess the relative importance of motility diversity (i.e.…
In living cells, membrane morphology is regulated by various proteins. Many membrane reshaping proteins contain a Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs (BAR) domain, which consists of a banana-shaped rod. The BAR domain bends the biomembrane along the rod…