Related papers: Protein Pattern Formation
Dynamic patterning of specific proteins is essential for the spatiotemporal regulation of many important intracellular processes in procaryotes, eucaryotes, and multicellular organisms. The emergence of patterns generated by interactions of…
Intracellular protein patterns govern essential cellular functions by dynamically redistributing proteins between membrane-bound and cytosolic states, conserving their total numbers. This review presents a theoretical framework for…
Spatial organization of proteins in cells is important for many biological functions. In general, the nonlinear, spatially coupled models for protein-pattern formation are only accessible to numerical simulations, which has limited insight…
Proteins control many vital functions in living cells, such as cell growth and cell division. Reliable coordination of these functions requires the spatial and temporal organizaton of proteins inside cells, which encodes information about…
Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…
We use the oscillating Min proteins of Escherichia coli as a prototype system to illustrate the current state and potential of modeling protein dynamics in space and time. We demonstrate how a theoretical approach has led to striking new…
We examine fluctuation effects due to the low copy number of proteins involved in pattern-forming dynamics within a bacterium. We focus on a stochastic model of the oscillating MinCDE protein system regulating accurate cell division in E.…
In E. coli, accurate cell division depends upon the oscillation of Min proteins from pole to pole. We provide a model for the polar localization of MinD based only on diffusion, a delay for nucleotide exchange, and different rates of…
Intracellular transport processes are essential to the healthy development of many organisms as well as more generally to healthy cellular function. The complex dynamics and interactions between protein molecules and filaments on different…
Many essential cellular processes, including cell division and the establishment of cell polarity during embryogenesis, are regulated by pattern-forming proteins. These proteins often need to bind to a substrate, such as the cell membrane,…
Rhythmic and sequential segmentation of the embryonic body plan is a vital developmental patterning process in all vertebrate species. However, a theoretical framework capturing the emergence of dynamic patterns of gene expression from the…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
Cell polarization underlies many cellular processes, such as differentiation, migration, and budding. Many living cells, such as budding yeast and fission yeast, use cytoskeletal structures to actively transport proteins to one location on…
Positioning of the midcell division plane within the bacterium E. coli is controlled by the min system of proteins: MinC, MinD and MinE. These proteins coherently oscillate from end to end of the bacterium. We present a reaction--diffusion…
Spatiotemporal patterns are common in biological systems. For electrically-coupled cells previous studies of pattern formation have mainly used external forcing as the main bifurcation parameter. The purpose of this paper is to show that…
Self-organization of proteins in space and time is of crucial importance for the functioning of cellular processes. Often, this organization takes place in the presence of strong random fluctuations due to the small number of molecules…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
We investigate the oscillatory dynamics and bifurcation structure of a reaction-diffusion system with bistable nonlinearity and mass conservation, which was proposed by [Otsuji et al, PLoS Comp. Biol. 3 (2007), e108]. The system is a useful…
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,…