Related papers: Nonequilibrium mechanisms underlying de novo bioge…
Organelle patterning and its heritability remain central mysteries in cell biology, highlighting the fundamental tension between genetic inheritance and self-assembly. Here, we explore the nonequilibrium assembly and emdedded size control…
From the Golgi apparatus to endosomes, organelles in the endomembrane system exhibit complex and varied morphologies that are often related to their function. Such membrane-bound organelles operate far from equilibrium due to directed…
The mechanisms controlling the transport of proteins across the Golgi stack of mammalian and plant cells is the subject of intense debate, with two models, cisternal progression and inter-cisternal exchange, emerging as major contenders. A…
The dynamical organization of membrane-bound organelles along intracellular transport pathways relies on vesicular exchange between organelles and on biochemical maturation of the organelle content by specific enzymes. The relative…
A living cell's interior is one of the most complex and intrinsically dynamic systems, providing an elaborate interplay between cytosolic crowding and ATP-driven motion, which controls cellular functionality. Here, we investigated two…
Biological nanomachines are nanometer-size macromolecular complexes that catalyze chemical reactions in the presence of substrate molecules. The catalytic functions carried out by such nanomachines in the cytoplasm, and biological membranes…
Understanding the spatial organisation of the genome in the cell nucleus is one of the current grand challenges in biophysics. Certain biochemical -- or epigenetic -- marks that are deposited along the genome are thought to play an…
Single-cell trajectory analysis aims to reconstruct the biological developmental processes of cells as they evolve over time, leveraging temporal correlations in gene expression. During cellular development, gene expression patterns…
How cells regulate the number of organelles is a fundamental question in cell biology. While decades of experimental work have uncovered four fundamental processes that regulate organelle biogenesis, namely, de novo synthesis, fission,…
We present a general theoretical framework to discuss mechanisms of morphogen transport and gradient formation in a cell layer. Trafficking events on the cellular scale lead to transport on larger scales. We discuss in particular the case…
Morphogen transport is a biological process, occurring in the tissue of living organisms, which is a determining step in cell differentiation. We present rigorous analysis of a simple model of this process, which is a system coupling…
Intracellular transport of organelles is fundamental to cell function and health. The mounting evidence suggests that this transport is in fact anomalous. However, the reasons for the anomaly is still under debate. We examined experimental…
Many transport processes in nature take place on substrates, often considered as unidimensional lanes. These unidimensional substrates are typically non-static: affected by a fluctuating environment, they can undergo conformational changes.…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has emerged as a fundamental mechanism underlying intracellular organization, with evidence for it being reported in numerous different systems. However, there is a growing concern regarding the lack of…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
A continuous route from a disordered soup of simple chemical feedstocks to a functional protocell -- a compartment that metabolizes, grows, and propagates -- remains elusive. Here, we show that a homogeneous aqueous chemical mixture…
We consider the influence of disorder on the non-equilibrium steady state of a minimal model for intracellular transport. In this model particles move unidirectionally according to the \emph{totally asymmetric exclusion process} (TASEP) and…
Intracellular components explore the cytoplasm via active motor-driven transport in conjunction with passive diffusion. We model the motion of organelles in narrow tubular cells using analytical techniques and numerical simulations to study…
It is well established that a wide variety of phenomena in cellular and molecular biology involve anomalous transport e.g. the statistics for the motility of cells and molecules are fractional and do not conform to the archetypes of simple…
Compartmentalization into biochemically distinct organelles constantly exchanging material is one of the hallmarks of eukaryotic cells. In the most naive picture of inter-organelle transport driven by concentration gradients, concentration…