Related papers: Self-Organization of Self-Clearing Beating Pattern…
Ciliated tissues such as in the mammalian lungs, brains, and reproductive tracts, are specialized to pump fluid. They generate flows by the collective activity of hundreds of thousands of individual cilia that beat in a striking metachronal…
Biological systems are robust to perturbations at both the genetic and environmental levels. Yet, these same perturbations can elicit variation in behavior. The interplay between functional robustness and behavioral variability is…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
Motile cilia are a striking example of functional cellular organelle, conserved across all the eukaryotic species. Motile cilia allow swimming of cells and small organisms and transport of liquids across epithelial tissues. Whilst the…
Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…
Spatial self-organization emerges in distributed systems exhibiting local interactions when nonlinearities and the appropriate propagation of signals are at work. These kinds of phenomena can be modeled with different frameworks, typically…
The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence…
Intracellular networks process cellular-level information and control cell fate. They can be computationally modeled using Boolean networks, which are implicit-time causal models of discrete binary events. These networks can be embedded in…
The structural reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton is facilitated through the action of motor proteins that crosslink the actin filaments and transport them relative to each other. Here, we present a combined experimental-computational…
Cellular appendages such as cilia and flagella represent universal tools enabling cells and microbes, among other essential functionalities, to propel themselves in diverse environments. In its planktonic, i.e. freely swimming, state the…
Subcellular protein complexes and organelles exhibit diverse dynamic behaviors that reflect the mechanical constraints and organization of the intracellular environment. Although some structures follow classical Brownian motion, many…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
The organization of cells within tissues plays a vital role in various biological processes, including development and morphogenesis. As a result, understanding how cells self-organize in tissues has been an active area of research. In our…
We propose new activity-dependent adaptive Boolean networks inspired by the cis-regulatory mechanism in gene regulatory networks. We analytically show that our model can be solved for stationary in-degree distribution for a wide class of…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
This paper presents the foundation for a decomposition theory for Boolean networks, a type of discrete dynamical system that has found a wide range of applications in the life sciences, engineering, and physics. Given a Boolean network…
It has been proposed that adaptation in complex systems is optimized at the critical boundary between ordered and disordered dynamical regimes. Here, we review models of evolving dynamical networks that lead to self-organization of network…
Biological rhythms are generated by pacemaker organs, such as the heart pacemaker organ (the sinoatrial node) and the master clock of the circadian rhythms (the suprachiasmatic nucleus), which are composed of a network of autonomously…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…