Related papers: Interrogating the Escherichia coli cell cycle by c…
The mechanism and driving forces of chromosome segregation in the bacterial cell cycle of E. coli is one of the least understood events in its life cycle. Using principles of entropic repulsion between polymer loops confined in a cylinder,…
Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…
In permissive environments, E. coli can double its dry mass every 21 minutes. During this time, ribosomes, RNA polymerases, and the proteome are all doubled. Yet, the question of how to relate bacterial doubling time to other biologically…
We consider a general growth mechanism, which acts at cellular level and above (organs, systems and whole organisms). Using its mathematical representation, the growth equation, we study the growth and division mechanisms of amoeba and…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
Developing epithelial tissues coordinate cell proliferation and mechanical forces to achieve proper size and shape. As epithelial cells tightly adhere together to form the confluent tissue, the distribution of cell areas significantly…
Growth-fragmentation processes model systems of cells that grow continuously over time and then fragment into smaller pieces. Typically, on average, the number of cells in the system exhibits asynchronous exponential growth and, upon…
Bacterial growth environment strongly influences the efficacy of antibiotic treatment, with slow growth often being associated with decreased susceptibility. Yet in many cases the connection between antibiotic susceptibility and pathogen…
Escherichia coli and other bacteria use rotating helical filaments to swim. Each cell typically has about four filaments, which bundle or disperse depending on the sense of motor rotation. To study the bundling process, we built a…
Solving population balance equations, we derive analytical steady-state cell size distributions for single-lineage experiments, such as the mother machine. These experiments are fundamentally different from batch cultures where populations…
The spatiotemporal coordination and regulation of cell proliferation is fundamental in many aspects of development and tissue maintenance. Cells have the ability to adapt their division rates in response to mechanical constraints, yet we do…
The spatiotemporal oscillations of the Min proteins in the bacterium Escherichia coli play an important role in cell division. A number of different models have been proposed to explain the dynamics from the underlying biochemistry. Here,…
Classic models of cell size control consider cells divide while reaching a threshold, e.g. size, age, or size extension. The molecular basis of the threshold involves multiple layers of regulation as well as gene noises. In this work, we…
Cell division times in microbial populations display significant fluctuations, that impact the population growth rate in a non-trivial way. If fluctuations are uncorrelated among different cells, the population growth rate is predicted by…
Escherichia coli is a motile bacterium that moves up a chemoattractant gradient by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating runs and tumbles. This paper presents calculations of the chemotactic drift velocity vd (the mean…
The stoichiometry of metabolic networks usually gives rise to a family of conservation laws for the aggregate concentration of specific pools of metabolites, which not only constrain the dynamics of the network, but also provide key insight…
I consider how cell shape and environmental geometry affect the rate of nutrient capture and the consequent maximum growth rate of a cell, focusing on rod-like species like \textit{E.\ coli}. Simple modeling immediately implies that it is…
Growth rate is one of the most important and most complex phenotypic characteristics of unicellular microorganisms, which determines the genetic mutations that dominate at the population level, and ultimately whether the population will…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
We model the growth of a cell population using a piecewise deterministic Markov branching tree. In this model, each cell splits into two offspring at a division rate $B(x)$, which depends on its size $x$. The size of each cell increases…