Related papers: Positive feedback can lead to dynamic nanometer-sc…
Positive feedback regulation is ubiquitous in cell signaling networks, often leading to binary outcomes in response to graded stimuli. However, the role of such feedbacks in clustering, and in spatial spreading of activated molecules, has…
Ras GTPases are lipid-anchored G proteins which play a fundamental role in cell signaling processes. Electron micrographs of immunogold-labeled Ras have shown that membrane-bound Ras molecules segregate into nanocluster domains. Several…
Motivated by experimental and theoretical work on autonomous oscillations in yeast, we analyze ordinary differential equations models of large populations of cells with cell-cycle dependent feedback. We assume a particular type of feedback…
In many cellular signaling pathways, key components form clusters at the cell membrane. Although much work has focused on the mechanisms behind such cluster formation, the implications for downstream signaling remain poorly understood.…
Protein aggregation on the plasma membrane (PM) is of critical importance to many cellular processes such as cell adhesion, endocytosis, fibrillar conformation, and vesicle transport. Lateral diffusion of protein aggregates or clusters on…
Cell adhesion proteins typically form stable clusters that anchor the cell membrane to its environment. Several works have suggested that cell membrane protein clusters can emerge from a local feedback between the membrane curvature and the…
Spatial information from cell-surface receptors is crucial for processes that require signal processing and sensing of the environment. Here, we investigate the optimal placement of such receptors through a theoretical model that minimizes…
Many membrane-bound molecules in cells form small clusters. It has been hypothesized that these clusters convert an analog extracellular signal into a digital intracellular signal and that this conversion increases signaling fidelity.…
It has recently been proposed that proteins embedded in lipidic bio-membranes can spontaneously self-organize into stable small clusters, or membrane nano-domains, due to the competition between short-range attractive and longer-range…
Quorum sensing is a decentralized biological process, through which a community of cells with no global awareness coordinate their functional behaviors based solely on cell-medium interactions and local decisions. This paper draws…
Cell adhesion proteins are transmembrane proteins that bind cells to their environment. These proteins typically cluster into disk-shaped or linear structures. Here we show that such clustering patterns spontaneously emerge when the protein…
How do single cell fate decisions induced by activation of key signaling proteins above threshold concentrations within a time interval are affected by stochastic fluctuations in biochemical reactions? We address this question using minimal…
The living cell expends energetic and material resources to reliably process information from its environment. To do so, it utilises unreliable molecular circuitry that is subject to thermal and other fluctuations. Here, we argue that…
The activity of biological cells is primarily based on chemical reactions and typically modeled as a reaction-diffusion system. Cells are, however, highly crowded with macromolecules, including a variety of molecular machines such as…
The proper functioning of multicellular organisms requires the robust establishment of precise proportions between distinct cell-types. This developmental differentiation process typically involves intracellular regulatory and stochastic…
We present an experimental study on the collective behavior of macroscopic self-propelled particles that are externally excited by light. This property allows testing the system response to the excitation intensity in a very versatile…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…
Nuclear star clusters (NCs) are found to exist in the centres of many galaxies and appear to follow scaling relations similar to those of super-massive black holes. Previous analytical work has suggested that such relations are a…
Receptor-ligand binding is a critical first step in signal transduction and the duration of the interaction can impact signal generation. In mammalian cells, clustering of receptors may be facilitated by heterogeneous zones of lipids, known…
A novel mechanism for cell differentiation is proposed, based on the dynamic clustering in a globally coupled chaotic system. A simple model with metabolic reaction, active transport of chemicals from media, and cell division is found to…