Related papers: Bistability: Requirements on Cell-Volume, Protein …
Understanding to what extent stem cell potential is a cell-intrinsic property, or an emergent behavior coming from global tissue dynamics and geometry, is a key outstanding question of systems and stem cell biology. Here, we propose a…
Bacteriophages are viruses infecting bacteria and archaea. Many phage species cause infections which lead to the certain death of the infected prokaryotic host cell and the release of a large batch of phage progeny, yet they have been able…
Phagocytosis is the process by which cells, which are 5 to 10 times larger than the particle size, engulf particles, holding substantial importance in various biological contexts ranging from the nutrient uptake of unicellular organisms to…
In this article, we study the mixing properties of metastable diffusion processes which possess a Gibbs invariant distribution. For systems with multiple stable equilibria, so-called metastable transitions between these equilibria are…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
Biochemical models that exhibit bistability are of interest to biologists and mathematicians alike. Chemical reaction network theory can provide sufficient conditions for the existence of bistability, and on the other hand can rule out the…
The mechanical environment of a substrate plays a key role in influencing the behavior of adherent biological cells. Traditional tunable substrates have limitations as their mechanical properties cannot be dynamically altered in-situ during…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
Volume-filling cross-diffusion equations for the components of a tissue structure are formally derived from mass conservation laws and force balances for the interphase pressures and viscous drag forces in a multiphase approach. The…
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
In many complex systems, the dynamical evolution of the different components can result in adaptation of the connections between them. We consider the problem of how a fully connected network of discrete-state dynamical elements which can…
The discerning behavior of living systems relies on accurate interactions selected from the lot of molecular collisions occurring in the cell. To ensure the reliability of interactions, binding partners are classically envisioned as finely…
Bacteria are highly adaptive microorganisms that thrive in a wide range of growth conditions via changes in cell morphologies and macromolecular composition. How bacterial morphologies are regulated in diverse environmental conditions is a…
We study the random walk of a particle in a compartmentalized environment, as realized in biological samples or solid state compounds. Each compartment is characterized by its length $L$ and the boundaries transmittance $T$. We identify two…
Recent work on particle-based models of tissues has suggested that any finite rate of cell division and cell death is sufficient to fluidize an epithelial tissue. At the same time, experimental evidence has indicated the existence of glassy…
Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
Bistable biochemical switches are ubiquitous in gene regulatory networks and signal transduction pathways. Their switching dynamics, however, are difficult to study directly in experiments or conventional computer simulations, because…
The biological processes that execute complex multiple functions, such as cell cycle, must ensure the order of sequential events and keep the dynamic robustness against various fluctuations. Here, we examine the dynamic mechanism and the…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…