Related papers: Do cells sense time by number of divisions?
We investigate a model of cell division in which the length of telomeres within the cell regulate their proliferative potential. At each cell division the ends of linear chromosomes change and a cell becomes senescent when one or more of…
Telomeres are repetitive sequences situated at both ends of the chromosomes of eukaryotic cells. At each cell division, they are eroded until they reach a critical length that triggers a state in which the cell stops to divide: the…
Cells of the human body have nearly identical genome but exhibit very different phenotypes that allow them to carry out specific functions and react to changes in their surrounding environment. This division of labour is achieved by…
Mammalian cells are restricted from proliferating indefinitely. Telomeres at the end of each chromosome are shortened at cell division and, when they reach a critical length, the cell will enter permanent cell cycle arrest - a state known…
As cell proliferation is limited due to the loss of telomere repeats in DNA of normal somatic cells during division, telomere attrition can possibly play an important role in determining the maximum life span of organisms as well as…
Cellular senescence is thought to play a major role in age-related diseases, which cause nearly 67% of all human deaths worldwide. Recent research in mice showed that exercising mice had higher levels of telomerase, an enzyme that helps…
Telomeres are repetitive sequences of nucleotides at the end of chromosomes, whose evolution over time is intrinsically related to biological ageing. In most cells, with each cell division, telomeres shorten due to the so-called end…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
All cells must keep time to consistently perform vital biological functions. To that end, the coupling and interrelatedness of diverse subsecond events in the complex cellular environment, such as protein folding or translation rates,…
It has been known for many years that small fractions of persister cells resist killing in many bacterial colony-antimicrobial confrontations. These persisters are not believed to be mutants. Rather it has been hypothesized that they are…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
The time distribution of relaxation events in an aging system is investigated via molecular dynamics simulations. The focus is on the distribution functions of the first passage time, $p_1(\Delta t)$, and the persistence time, $p(\tau)$. In…
Replicative senescence, induced by telomere shortening, exhibits considerable asynchrony and heterogeneity, the origins of which remain unclear. Here, we formally study how telomere shortening mechanisms impact on senescence kinetics and…
Segregation of different cell types is a crucial process for the pattern formation in tissues, in particular during embryogenesis. Since the involved cell interactions are complex and difficult to measure individually in experiments,…
Cell motility is one of the most fundamental phenomena underlying biological processes that maintain living organisms alive. Here we introduce a simple model to describe the motility of cells which include not only time-correlated internal…
A novel theory for cell differentiation is proposed, based on simulations with interacting artificial cells which have metabolic networks within, and divide into two when the final product is accumulated. Results of simulations with coupled…
A feature of current membrane systems is the fact that objects and membranes are persistent. However, this is not true in the real world. In fact, cells and intracellular proteins have a well-defined lifetime. Inspired from these biological…
The spread of a particular trait in a cell population often is modelled by an appropriate system of ordinary differential equations describing how the sizes of subpopulations of the cells with the same genome change in time. On the other…
Cells actively regulate their size during the cell cycle to maintain volume homeostasis across generations. While various mathematical models of cell size regulation have been proposed to explain how this is achieved, relating these models…
We introduce and theoretically investigate a minimal particle-based model for a new class of active matter where particles exhibit directional, volume-conserving division in confinement while interacting sterically, mimicking cells in early…