Related papers: Spatial heterogeneities shape collective behavior …
Quantitative experiments are described on spatio-temporal patterns of coherent chemical signaling activity in populations of {\it Dictyostelium discoideum} amoebae. We observe competition between spontaneously firing centers and rotating…
Dictyostelium discoideum (D.d.) is a widely studied amoeba due to its capabilities of development, survival, and self-organization. During aggregation it produces and relays a chemical signal (cAMP) which shows spirals and target centers.…
Unicellular organisms exhibit elaborate collective behaviors in response to environmental cues. These behaviors are controlled by complex biochemical networks within individual cells and coordinated through cell-to-cell communication.…
Chemotaxis, the movement of an organism in response to chemical stimuli, is a typical feature of many microbiological systems. In particular, the social amoeba \textit{Disctyostelium discoideum} is widely used as a model organism, but it is…
Collective behavior in cellular populations is coordinated by biochemical signaling networks within individual cells. Connecting the dynamics of these intracellular networks to the population phenomena they control poses a considerable…
We present results of experiments on the dynamics of Dictyostelium discoideum in a novel set-up which constraints cell motion to a plane. After aggregation, the amoebae collect into round ''pancake" structures in which the cells rotate…
The transition from single-cell to multicellular behavior is important in early development but rarely studied. The starvation-induced aggregation of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum into a multicellular slug is known to result…
The coupling of the internal mechanisms of cell polarization to cell shape deformations and subsequent cell crawling poses many interdisciplinary scientific challenges. Several mathematical approaches have been proposed to model the…
We report experimental and theoretical results on spatiotemporal pattern formation in cell populations, where the parameters vary in space and time due to mechanisms intrinsic to the system, namely Dictyostelium discoideum (D.d.) in the…
Chemotaxis is a ubiquitous biological phenomenon in which cells detect a spatial gradient of chemoattractant, and then move towards the source. Here we present a position-dependent advection-diffusion model that quantitatively describes the…
The phase ordering dynamics of coupled chaotic bistable maps on lattices with defects is investigated. The statistical properties of the system are characterized by means of the average normalized size of spatial domains of equivalent spin…
We aim to understand the formation of abnormal waves of activity from myocardial regions with diminished cell-to-cell coupling. In route to this goal, we studied the behavior of a heterogeneous myocyte network in which a sharp coupling…
We study collective dynamics of interacting centers of exciton-polariton condensation in presence of spatial inhomogeneity, as modeled by diatomic active oscillator lattices. The mode formalism is developed and employed to derive existence…
The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…
We investigate the final stage of cytokinesis in two types of amoeba, pointing out the existence of biphasic furrow contraction. The first phase is characterized by a constant contraction rate, is better studied, and seems universal to a…
Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…
We report experimental evidence of the route to spatiotemporal chaos in a large 1D-array of hotspots in a thermoconvective system. Increasing the driving force, a stationary cellular pattern becomes unstable towards a mixed pattern of…
Cilia and flagella are hair-like extensions of eukaryotic cells which generate oscillatory beat patterns that can propel micro-organisms and create fluid flows near cellular surfaces. The evolutionary highly conserved core of cilia and…
Eukaryotic cell motility involves a complex network of interactions between biochemical components and mechanical processes. The cell employs this network to polarize and induce shape changes that give rise to membrane protrusions and…
Eukaryotic cells are large enough to detect signals and then orient to them by differentiating the signal strength across the length and breadth of the cell. Amoebae, fibroblasts, neutrophils and growth cones all behave in this way. Little…