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How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
Cell migration is a fundamental process involved in physiological phenomena such as the immune response and morphogenesis, but also in pathological processes, such as the development of tumor metastasis. These functions are effectively…
A simple model is proposed that describes the various morphodynamic principles of migrating cells from polar to amoeboidal motions. The model equation is derived using competing internal cellular compass variables and symmetries of the…
Cells exhibit qualitatively different behaviors on substrates with different rigidities. The fact that cells are more polarized on the stiffer substrate motivates us to construct a two-dimensional cell with the distribution of focal…
Presented with sensory challenges, living cells employ extensive noisy, fluctuating signalling and communication among themselves to compute a physiologically proper response which often results in symmetry breaking. We propose, based on…
Biochemical signalling cascades transduce extracellular stimuli into cellular responses through sequences of discrete, node-to-node activations. While signal fidelity depends critically on local interaction kinetics, the mechanisms…
The spatial organization of enzymes often plays a crucial role in the functionality and efficiency of enzymatic pathways. To fully understand the design and operation of enzymatic pathways, it is therefore crucial to understand how the…
Adhering cells actively probe the mechanical properties of their environment and use the resulting information to position and orient themselves. We show that a large body of experimental observations can be consistently explained from one…
Many eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can exhibit remarkable sensing ability under small gradient of chemical compound. In this study, we approach this phenomenon by considering the contribution of multiple ligands to the chemical kinetics…
Interactions between neighboring cells are essential for generating or refining patterns in a number of biological systems. We propose a discrete filtering approach to predict how networks of cells modulate spatially varying input signals…
In many sensory systems, transmembrane receptors are spatially organized in large clusters. Such arrangement may facilitate signal amplification and the integration of multiple stimuli. However, this organization likely also affects the…
A qualitative model is presented, suggesting gravitational information is transduced into biological systems primarily by its effect on spatially organised membrane and cytoplasmic flows. Continuous low affinity interactions between…
Glutamate and glycine are important neurotransmitters in the brain. An action potential prop- agating in the terminal of a presynatic neuron causes the release of glutamate and glycine in the synapse by vesicles fusing with the cell…
Living cells sense their environment through the binding of extra-cellular molecular ligands to cell surface receptors. Puzzlingly, vast numbers of signaling pathways exhibit a high degree of cross talk between different signals whereby…
How can a microorganism adapt to a variety of environmental conditions despite there exists a limited number of signal transduction machineries? We show that for any growing cells whose gene expression is under stochastic fluctuations,…
Sensors are the first element of the pathways that control the response of cells to their environment. After chemical, the next most important cue is mechanical, and protein complexes that produce or enable a chemical signal in response to…
Signaling pathways are responsible for the regulation of cell processes, such as monitoring the external environment, transmitting information across membranes, and making cell fate decisions. Given the increasing amount of biological data…
Biomolecular condensates form on timescales of seconds in cells upon environmental or compositional changes. Condensate formation is thus argued to act as a mechanism for sensing such changes and quickly initiating downstream processes,…
Most models of biological pattern formation are simulated on continuous domains even though cells are discrete objects that provide internal boundaries to the diffusion of regulatory components. In our previous papers on simulating…
A novel definition of the stimulus-specific information is presented, which is particularly useful when the stimuli constitute a continuous and metric set, as for example, position in space. The approach allows one to build the spatial…