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Various biological sensory systems exhibit a response to a relative change of the stimulus, often referred to as fold-change detection. In the last few years fold-change detecting mechanisms, based on transcriptional networks, have been…

Muscles sense internally generated and externally applied forces, responding to these in a coordinated hierarchical manner at different time scales. The center of the basic unit of the muscle, the sarcomeric M-band, is perfectly placed to…

Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…

The activation/repression of a given gene is typically regulated by multiple transcription factors (TFs) that bind at the gene regulatory region and recruit RNA polymerase (RNAP). The interactions between the promoter region and TFs and…

We present a stochastic formalism for signal transduction processes in bacterial two-component system. Using elementary mass action kinetics, the proposed model takes care of signal transduction in terms of phosphotransfer mechanism between…

Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…

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…

The actin cortex is a thin layer of actin, myosin, and actin binding proteins that underlies the membrane of most animal cells. It is highly dynamic and can undergo remodelling on time-scales of tens of seconds thanks to protein turnover…

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…

Cellular decision-making based on information received from the external environment is frequently initiated by transmembrane receptors. These receptors are known to propagate such information by triggering a series of irreversible,…

The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously restructuring itself. Enzymatic motors that act on the…

Myosin II is the muscle molecular motor that works in two bipolar arrays in each thick filament of the striated (skeletal and cardiac) muscle, converting the chemical energy into steady force and shortening by cyclic ATP--driven…

Protein phosphorylation is a reversible post-translational modification commonly used by cell signaling networks to transmit information about the extracellular environment into intracellular organelles for the regulation of the activity…

Detection and location of moving prey utilizing electrosense or mechanosense is a strategy commonly followed by animals which cannot rely on visual sense or hearing. In this article we consider the possibility to detect the source of a…

We illuminate the many-body effects underlying the structure, formation, and dissolution of cellular adhesion domains in the presence and absence of forces. We consider mixed Glauber-Kawasaki dynamics of a two-dimensional model of…

Cells exhibit qualitatively different behaviors on substrates with different rigidities. The fact that cells are more polarized on the stiffer substrate motivates us to construct a two-dimensional cell with the distribution of focal…

When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and…

The action potential propagating in a nerve fibre generates accompanying mechanical and thermal effects. The whole signal is therefore an ensemble which includes primary and secondary components. The primary components of a signal are the…

Mechanical cues like the rigidity of the substrate are main determinants for the decision making of adherent cells. Here we use a mechano-chemical model to predict the cellular response to varying substrate stiffness. The model equations…

Myosin II isoforms with varying mechanochemistry and filament size interact with filamentous actin (F-actin) networks to generate contractile forces in cells. How their properties control force production in environments with varying…