Related papers: Information and long term memory in calcium signal…
Living cells can leverage correlations in environmental fluctuations to predict the future environment and mount a response ahead of time. To this end, cells need to encode the past signal into the output of the intracellular network from…
Information processing in the mammalian brain relies on a careful regulation of the membrane potential dynamics of its constituent neurons, which propagates across the neuronal tissue via electrical signalling. We recently reported the…
The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling cascade, an evolutionarily conserved motif present in all eukaryotic cells, is involved in coordinating critical cell-fate decisions, regulating protein synthesis, and mediating learning…
Toxoplasma gondii is the causative agent responsible for toxoplasmosis and serves as one of the most common parasites in the world. For a successful lytic cycle, T. gondii must traverse biological barriers in order to invade host cells, and…
Communication between cells is realized by exchange of biochemical substances. Due to internal organization of living systems and variability of external parameters, the exchange is heavily influenced by perturbations of various parameters…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
Engineered systems typically separate mechanical function from information processing, whereas biological systems can exploit physical structure as a medium for information processing and computation. Motivated by this contrast, recent work…
It is shown, by means of numerical simulations, that intercellular spiral waves of calcium can be initiated in a network of coupled cells as a result of a de-synchronization between Ca2+ oscillations in two domains. No artificial…
Most of the intra-cellular events involved in the initiation and propagation phases of this process has now been identified astrocytes. The control of the spread of intracellular calcium signaling has been demonstrated to occur at several…
The ubiquity of information transmission via molecular communication between cells is comprehensively documented on Earth; this phenomenon might even have played a vital role in the origin(s) and early evolution of life. Motivated by these…
Serotonergic neurons of the dorsal raphe nuclei, with their extensive innervation of nearly the whole brain have important modulatory effects on many cognitive and physiological processes. They play important roles in clinical depression…
Plants are capable of intelligent responses to complex environmental signals. Learning and memory play fundamental roles in such responses. Two simple models of plant memory are proposed based on the calcium-signalling system. The memory…
The activity of neurons within brain circuits has been ubiquitously reported to be correlated. The impact of these correlations on brain function has been extensively investigated. Correlations can in principle increase or decrease the…
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a highly complex structure through which biochemical and mechanical signals are transmitted. In processes of cell migration, the ECM also acts as a scaffold, providing structural support to cells as well as…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realise that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or…
Measurements of many biological processes are characterized by an initial trend period followed by an equilibrium period. Scientists may wish to quantify features of the two periods, as well as the timing of the change point. Specifically,…
Cells continuously interact with their environment mediating their responses through signaling cascades. Very often, external stimuli induce pulsatile behaviors in intermediaries of the cascade of increasing frequency with the stimulus…
In multicellular organisms, cells coordinate their activities through cell-cell communication (CCC), which is crucial for development, tissue homeostasis, and disease progression. Recent advances in single-cell and spatial omics…
Potassium channels play critical roles in many physiological processes, providing a selective permeation route for K+ ions in and out of a cell, by employing a carefully designed selectivity filter, evolutionarily conserved from viruses to…