Related papers: Cell-to-cell variation sets a tissue-rheology-depe…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
Movement of cell clusters along extracellular matrices (ECM) during tissue development, wound healing, and early stage of cancer invasion involve various inter-connected migration modes such as: (1) cell movement within clusters, (2)…
The classical macroscopic chemotaxis equations have previously been derived from an individual-based description of the tactic response of cells that use a "run-and-tumble" strategy in response to environmental cues. Here we derive…
Cell adhesion proteins typically form stable clusters that anchor the cell membrane to its environment. Several works have suggested that cell membrane protein clusters can emerge from a local feedback between the membrane curvature and the…
In recent years experiments have demonstrated that living cells can measure low chemical concentrations with high precision, and much progress has been made in understanding what sets the fundamental limit to the precision of chemical…
The proper functioning of multicellular organisms requires the robust establishment of precise proportions between distinct cell-types. This developmental differentiation process typically involves intracellular regulatory and stochastic…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
Bacteria track chemical gradients using a biased random walk, a process called chemotaxis. Experiments suggest that bacteria also communicate during this process. Using a mathematical model, we find that sufficiently strong communication…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…
Collective cell migration plays an essential role in various biological processes, such as development or cancer proliferation. While cell-cell interactions are clearly key determinants of collective cell migration -- in addition to…
We study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…
Many types of motile cells perform durotaxis, namely, directed migration following gradients of substrate stiffness. Recent experiments have revealed that cell monolayers can migrate toward stiffer regions even when individual cells do not…
Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is…
Collective response to external directional cues like electric fields plays a pivotal role in processes such as tissue development, regeneration, and wound healing. In this study we focus on the impact of anisotropy in cell shape and local…
Living cells deploy many resources to sense their environments, including receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and fuel. However, it is not known which resources fundamentally limit the precision of sensing, like weak links in a…
Chemotaxis plays a crucial role in a variety of processes in biology and ecology. Quite often it acts to improve efficiency of biological reactions; one example is the immune system signalling, where infected tissues release chemokines…
In the chemotactic motion of Escherichia coli, the switching of transmembrane chemoreceptors between active and inactive states is one of the most important steps of the signaling pathway. We study the effect of this switching time-scale on…
The use of galaxy clusters as cosmological probes hinges on our ability to measure their masses accurately and with high precision. Hydrostatic mass is one of the most common methods for estimating the masses of individual galaxy clusters,…
We study the effect of chemotactic signaling among mesenchymal cells. We show that the particular physiology of the mesenchymal cells allows one-dimensional collapse in contrast to the case of bacteria, and that the mesenchymal…
Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…