Related papers: Coordination of size-control, reproduction and gen…
Cell division is a process that involves many biochemical steps and complex biophysical mechanisms. To simplify the understanding of what triggers cell division, three basic models that subsume more microscopic cellular processes associated…
To maintain a constant cell size, dividing cells have to coordinate cell cycle events with cell growth. This coordination has for long been supposed to rely on the existence of size thresholds determining cell cycle progression [1]. In…
A ubiquitous feature of living cells is their growth over time followed by division into daughter cells. How isogenic cell populations maintain size homeostasis, i.e., a narrow distribution of cell size, is an intriguing fundamental…
Living cells maintain size homeostasis by actively compensating for size fluctuations. Here, we present two stochastic maps that unify phenomenological models by integrating fluctuating single-cell growth rates and size-dependent noise…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…
A fissioning organism may purge unrepairable damage by bequeathing it preferentially to one of its daughters. Using the mathematical formalism of superprocesses, we propose a flexible class of analytically tractable models that allow quite…
For two resource-sharing species we explore the interplay of harvesting and dispersal strategies, as well as their influence on competition outcomes. Although the extinction of either species can be achieved by excessive culling, choosing a…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…
Cell size is a fundamental determinant of cellular physiology, influencing processes such as growth, division, and function. In this study, we develop a segmented mathematical framework to investigate how different control mechanisms…
Recent experiments have supported the Adder model for E. coli division control. This model posits that bacteria grow, on average, a fixed size before division. It also predicts decorrelation between the noise in the added size and the size…
Modelling, analysing and inferring triggering mechanisms in population reproduction is fundamental in many biological applications. It is also an active and growing research domain in mathematical biology. In this chapter, we review the…
The rate at which individual bacterial cells grow depends on the concentrations of cellular components such as ribosomes and proteins. These concentrations continuously fluctuate over time and are inherited from mother to daughter cells,…
It is well known that the different cell-division models, such as Timer, Sizer, and Adder, can be distinguished based on the correlations between different single-cell-level quantities such as birth-size, division-time, division-size, and…
We consider a class of biologically-motivated stochastic processes in which a unicellular organism divides its resources (volume or damaged proteins, in particular) symmetrically or asymmetrically between its progeny. Assuming the final…
We analyze the advantage of cell size control strategies in growing populations under mortality constraints. We demonstrate a general advantage of the adder control strategy in the presence of growth-dependent mortality, and for different…
How exponentially growing cells maintain size homeostasis is an important fundamental problem. Recent single-cell studies in prokaryotes have uncovered the adder principle, where cells on average, add a fixed size (volume) from birth to…
Species augmentation is one of the methods used to promote biodiversity and prevent endangered species loss and extinction. The current work applies discrete-time optimal control theory to two models of species augmentation for…
Life presents fascinating examples of self-organization and emergent phenomena. In multi-cellular organisms, a multitude of cells interact to form and maintain highly complex body plans of well-defined size. In this thesis, we investigate…
Cells achieve size homeostasis by regulating their division timing based on their size, added size, and cell cycle time. Previous research under steady-state conditions demonstrated the robustness of these mechanisms. However, their dynamic…