Related papers: Mitochondrial heterogeneity
Cells can utilize chemical communication to exchange information and coordinate their behavior in the presence of noise. Communication can reduce noise to shape a collective response, or amplify noise to generate distinct phenotypic…
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…
Most of normal proliferative epithelia of plants and metazoans are topologically invariant and characterized by similar cell distributions according to the number of cell neighbors (DCNs). Here we study peculiarities of these distributions…
Heterogeneity in biological molecules, resulting in molecule-to-molecule variations in their dynamics and function, is an emerging theme. To elucidate the consequences of heterogeneous behavior at the single molecule level, we propose an…
Cell shape is determined by a balance of intrinsic properties of the cell as well as its mechanochemical environment. Inhomogeneous shape changes underly many morphogenetic events and involve spatial gradients in active cellular forces…
The physics of how molecules, organelles, and foreign objects move within living cells has been extensively studied in organisms ranging from bacteria to human cells. In mammalian cells, in particular, cellular vesicles move across the cell…
The understanding of mechanisms that control epigenetic changes is an important research area in modern functional biology. Epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation are in general very stable over many cell divisions. DNA…
Development of resistance limits transferability of most anticancer therapies into curative treatment and understanding mechanisms beyond it remains a big challenge. Many high resolution experimental observations show enormous intratumor…
In this paper, we discuss a general framework for multicontinuum homogenization. Multicontinuum models are widely used in many applications and some derivations for these models are established. In these models, several macroscopic…
We consider signal transaction in a simple neuronal model featuring intrinsic noise. The presence of noise limits the precision of neural responses and impacts the quality of neural signal transduction. We assess the signal transduction…
The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…
The origin of organelles (mitochondrion, chloroplast and nucleus) remains enigmatic. The endosymbiotic hypothesis that chloroplasts, mitochondria and nuclei descend from the endosymbiotic cyanobacterium, bacterium and archaebacterium…
Human bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) include skeletal stem cells with ground-breaking therapeutic potential. However, BMSC colonies have very heterogeneous in vivo behaviour, due to their different potency; this unpredictability is the…
Changes in gene expression occurring during differentiation of human monocytes into dendritic cells were studied at the RNA and protein levels. These studies showed the induction of several gene classes corresponding to various biological…
We study the interplay between diversity and noise in a 3D network of FitzHugh-Nagumo elements, with topology and dimensions chosen to model a pancreatic beta-cell cluster, as an example of an excitable cell network. Our results show that…
Multicellular tissues are the building blocks of many biological systems and organs. These tissues are not static, but dynamically change over time. Even if the overall structure remains the same there is a turnover of cells within the…
Multicellular systems play a key role in bioprocess and biomedical engineering. Cell ensembles encountered in these setups show phenotypic variability like size and biochemical composition. As this variability may result in undesired…
In higher organisms, all cells share the same genome, but every cell expresses only a limited and specific set of genes that defines the cell type. During cell division, not only the genome, but also the cell type is inherited by the…
Genetically identical cells under the same environmental conditions can show strong variations in protein copy numbers due to inherently stochastic events in individual cells. We here develop a theoretical framework to address how…
Maintaining tissue homeostasis requires appropriate regulation of stem cell differentiation. The Waddington landscape posits that gene circuits in a cell form a potential landscape of different cell types, wherein cells follow attractors of…