Related papers: Principles of efficient chemotactic pursuit
Migration of cells can be characterized by two, prototypical types of motion: individual and collective migration. We propose a statistical-inference approach designed to detect the presence of cell-cell interactions that give rise to…
Micro-organisms aggregate through chemotaxis against a concentration gradient of signals secreted by themselves. We have numerically studied a model consisting of elements with intracellular dynamics, random walks with a state-dependent…
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…
Collagen fibers, an important component of the extracellular matrix (ECM), can both inhibit and promote cellular migration. {\it In-vitro} studies have revealed that the fibers' orientations are crucial to cellular invasion, while {\it…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
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…
Cell migration is essential for regulating many biological processes in physiological or pathological conditions, including embryonic development and cancer invasion. In vitro and in silico studies suggest that collective cell migration is…
Quantitative models of associative learning that explain the behavior of real animals with high precision have turned out very difficult to construct. We do this in the context of the dynamics of the thermal preference of C. elegans. For…
Molecular motors are in charge of almost every process in the life cycle of cells, such as protein synthesis, DNA replication, and cell locomotion, hence being of crucial importance for understanding the cellular dynamics. However, given…
The ability of a cell to communicate with its environment is essential for key cellular functions like replication, metabolism, or cell fate decisions. The involved molecular mechanisms are highly dynamic and difficult to capture…
A variety of complex mechanisms, from chemical reaction pathways to active fluctuations, orchestrate molecular transport in intracellular environments. Despite significant recent progress in visualizing and probing these processes, little…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
We present an Imitation Learning approach for the control of dynamical systems with a known model. Our policy search method is guided by solutions from MPC. Typical policy search methods of this kind minimize a distance metric between the…
Cell migration in confining physiological environments relies on the concerted dynamics of several cellular components, including protrusions, adhesions with the environment, and the cell nucleus. However, it remains poorly understood how…
Stereotyped behaviors are series of postures that show very little variability between repeats. They have been used to classify the dynamics of individuals, groups and species without reference to the lower-level mechanisms that drive them.…
Imitation Learning (IL) is an appealing approach to learn desirable autonomous behavior. However, directing IL to achieve arbitrary goals is difficult. In contrast, planning-based algorithms use dynamics models and reward functions to…
Biological and living organisms sense and process information from their surroundings, typically having access only to a subset of external observables for a limited amount of time. In this work, we uncover how biological systems can…
The search for patterns or motifs in data represents an area of key interest to many researchers. In this paper we present the Motif Tracking Algorithm, a novel immune inspired pattern identification tool that is able to identify unknown…
T cells monitor the health status of cells by identifying foreign peptides displayed on their surface. T-cell receptors (TCRs), which are protein complexes found on the surface of T cells, are able to bind to these peptides. This process is…
When a single cell senses a chemical gradient and chemotaxes, stochastic receptor-ligand binding can be a fundamental limit to the cell's accuracy. For clusters of cells responding to gradients, however, there is a critical difference: even…