Related papers: Communication shapes sensory response in multicell…
Coordinated responses to environmental stimuli are critical for multicellular organisms. To overcome the obstacles of cell-to-cell heterogeneity and noisy signaling dynamics within individual cells, cells must effectively exchange…
Collective cell responses to exogenous cues depend on cell-cell interactions. In principle, these can result in enhanced sensitivity to weak and noisy stimuli. However, this has not yet been shown experimentally, and, little is known about…
Cells use biochemical networks to translate environmental information into intracellular responses. These responses can be highly dynamic, but how the information is encoded in these dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate…
In this letter we present the results of a simple model for intercellular communication via calcium oscillations, motivated in part by a recent experimental study. The model describes two cells (a "donor" and "sensor") whose intracellular…
Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…
It is important to understand the coordinated performance of cells in tissue. One possible mechanism in this coordination involves intracellular calcium signaling. The topology of intercellular connections in tissue should also play an…
Living organisms continuously harness energy to perform complex functions for their adaptation and survival while part of that energy is dissipated in the form of heat or chemical waste. Determining the energetic cost and the efficiency of…
In pancreatic $\beta$-cells, calcium oscillation signal is the core part of glucose-stimulated insulin secretion. Intracellular calcium concentration oscillates in response to the intake of glucose, which triggers the exocytosis of insulin…
We show that when cells communicate by contact-mediated interactions, heterogeneity in cell shapes and sizes leads to qualitatively distinct collective behavior in the tissue. For inter-cellular coupling that implements lateral inhibition,…
Feedback in sensory biochemical networks can give rise to bifurcations in cells' behavioral response. These bifurcations share many properties with thermodynamic critical points. Evidence suggests that biological systems may operate near…
Persistent activity is postulated to drive neural network plasticity and learning. To investigate its underlying cellular mechanisms, we developed a biophysically tractable model that explains the emergence, sustenance, and eventual…
Collective behavior in cellular populations is coordinated by biochemical signaling networks within individual cells. Connecting the dynamics of these intracellular networks to the population phenomena they control poses a considerable…
We study the dynamics of intracellular calcium oscillations in the presence of proteins that bind calcium on multiple sites and that are generally believed to act as passive calcium buffers in cells. We find that multisite calcium-binding…
Both action potentials and mechanosensitive signalling are an important communication mechanisms in plants. Considering an information theoretic framework, this paper explores the effective range of multiple action potentials for a long…
Many plants, such as Mimosa pudica (the sensitive plant), employ electrochemical signals known as action potentials (APs) for rapid intercellular communication. In this paper, we consider a reaction diffusion model of individual AP signals…
We present a simple biophysical model for the coupling between synaptic transmission and the local calcium concentration on an enveloping astrocytic domain. This interaction enables the astrocyte to modulate the information flow from…
In healthy hearts myocytes are typically coupled to nearest neighbours through gap junctions. Under pathological conditions such as fibrosis, or in scar tissue, or across ablation lines myocytes can uncouple from their neighbours.…
Oscillations represent a ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. The conventional models of biological periodic oscillations are usually proposed as interconnecting transcriptional feedback loops. Some specific proteins function as…
Metabolic oscillations in single cells underlie the mechanisms behind cell synchronization and cell-cell communication. For example, glycolytic oscillations mediated by biochemical communication between cells may synchronize the pulsatile…
Cancer cells exhibit increased motility and proliferation, which are instrumental in the formation of tumours and metastases. These pathological changes can be traced back to malfunctions of cellular signalling pathways, and calcium…