Related papers: Is Smaller Better: A Proposal To Consider Bacteria…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
The striking variety of macroscopic morphologies displayed by bacterial colonies depends on microscopic environmental and behavioural details in a manner that is currently not well understood. A surprising example is sibling inhibition,…
Molecular recognition, which is essential in processing information in biological systems, takes place in a crowded noisy biochemical environment and requires the recognition of a specific target within a background of various similar…
We introduce a model called Host-Pathogen game for studying biological competitions. Notably, we focus on the invasive dynamics of external agents, like bacteria, within a host organism. The former are mapped to a population of defectors…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Throughout the evolution of biological species on Earth, cells and organs have developed many complex structures and processes to ensure their interactions with individual chemical molecules (small and macromolecular) and nanoscale objects…
Bistability is considered wide-spread among bacteria and eukaryotic cells, useful e.g. for enzyme induction, bet hedging, and epigenetic switching. However, this phenomenon has mostly been described with deterministic dynamic or well-mixed…
We present a framework for analyzing luminescence regulation during quorum sensing in the bioluminescent bacterium \emph{Vibrio harveyi}. Using a simplified model for signal transduction in the quorum sensing pathway, we identify key…
We compare the informational architecture of biological and random networks to identify informational features that may distinguish biological networks from random. The study presented here focuses on the Boolean network model for…
Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…
"Secrete-and-sense cells" can communicate by secreting a signaling molecule while also producing a receptor that detects the molecule. The cell can potentially "talk" to itself ("self-communication") or talk to neighboring cells with the…
The unconstrained genomic DNA of bacteria forms a coil, which volume exceeds 1000 times the volume of the cell. Since prokaryotes lack a membrane-bound nucleus, in sharp contrast with eukaryotes, the DNA may consequently be expected to…
Biological organisms are simple at heart: cells, their basic units, perform a variety of behaviors by expressing proteins from DNA-encoded genes. Gene expression though depends on sets of often-convoluted regulatory interactions known as…
We introduce various models for cellulose bio-degradation by micro-organisms. Those models rely on complex chemical mechanisms, involve the structure of the cellulose chains and are allowed to depend on the phenotypical traits of the…
A population of neurons typically exhibits a broad diversity of responses to sensory inputs. The intuitive notion of functional classification is that cells can be clustered so that most of the diversity is captured in the identity of the…
As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…
Cell decision-making refers to the process by which cells gather information from their local microenvironment and regulate their internal states to create appropriate responses. Microenvironmental cell sensing plays a key role in this…
Cells coexist together in colonies or as tissues. Their behaviour is controlled by an interplay between intercellular forces and biochemical regulation. We develop a simple model of the cell cycle, the fundamental regulatory network…
In many systems we can describe emergent macroscopic behaviors, quantitatively, using models that are much simpler than the underlying microscopic interactions; we understand the success of this simplification through the renormalization…
Microorganisms like bacteria can sense concentration of chemo-attractants in its medium very accurately. They achieve this through interaction between the receptors on their cell surface and the chemo-attractant molecules (like sugar). But…