Related papers: Critical threshold for microtubule amplification t…
We use optical trapping to continuously bend an isolated microtubule while simultaneously measuring the applied force and the resulting filament strain, thus allowing us to determine its elastic properties over a wide range of applied…
Singular Spectrum Analysis and many other subspace-based methods of signal processing are implicitly relying on the assumption of close proximity of unperturbed and perturbed signal subspaces extracted by the Singular Value Decomposition of…
Our work aims at using quantitative imaging tools to complement the limitation of noise encountered by high resolution fluorescence microscopy methods. Several cycles of fluorophore activation, imaging and deactivation produce a sequence of…
We formulate a dynamical model for microtubules interacting with a catastrophe-inducing boundary. In this model microtubules are either waiting to be nucleated, actively growing or shrinking, or stalled at the boundary. We first determine…
Compartmentalization of self-replicating molecules (templates) in protocells is a necessary step towards the evolution of modern cells. However, coexistence between distinct template types inside a protocell can be achieved only if there is…
The migratory dynamics of cells can be influenced by the complex micro-environment through which they move. It remains unclear how the motility machinery of confined cells responds and adapts to their micro-environment. Here, we propose a…
The mitotic spindle lies at the heart of the spatio-temporal control over cellular components during cell division. The spindle consists of microtubules, which are not only crosslinked by motor proteins but also by passive binding proteins.…
Environmental heterogeneity can drive genetic heterogeneity in expanding populations; mutant strains may emerge that trade overall growth rate for an improved ability to survive in patches that are hostile to the wild type. This…
Plant morphology emerges from cellular growth and structure. The turgor-driven diffuse growth of a cell can be highly anisotropic: significant longitudinally and negligible radially. Such anisotropy is ensured by cellulose microfibrils…
During cellular translation, incorporation errors occur. It is the addition of amino acid residues not corresponding to the mRNA code. With an increase in the number of residues in the synthesized molecule, the probability of failure in at…
Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have crucial roles in the spread of tumors during metastasis. A decisive step is the extravasation of CTCs from the blood stream or lymph system, which depends on the ability of cells to attach to vessel…
In photosynthetic organisms, the energy of light during illumination is absorbed by the antenna complexes, which is transmitted by excitons and is either absorbed by the reaction centers (RCs), which have been closed in this way, or emitted…
We study the early time dynamics of the 2d ferromagnetic Ising model instantaneously quenched from the disordered to the ordered, low temperature, phase. We evolve the system with kinetic Monte Carlo rules that do not conserve the order…
A novel theoretical model of dynamic instability of a system of linear (1D) microtubules (MTs) in a bounded domain is introduced for studying the role of a cell edge in vivo and analyzing the effect of competition for a limited amount of…
Microtubules are biological protein polymers with critical and diverse functions. Their structures share some similarities with photosynthetic antenna complexes, particularly in the ordered arrangement of photoactive molecules with large…
The technique presented here identifies tethered mould designs, optimised for growing cultured tissue with very highly-aligned cells. It is based on a microscopic biophysical model for polarised cellular hydrogels. There is an unmet need…
We study the steady state of an assembly of microtubules in a confined volume, analogous to the situation inside a cell where the cell boundary forms a natural barrier to growth. We show that the dynamical equations for growing and…
A simulation approach to the stochastic growth of bacterial towers is presented, in which a non-uniform and finite nutrient supply essentially determines the emerging structure through elementary chemotaxis. The method is based on cellular…
The quintessential property of neuronal systems is their intensive patterns of selective synaptic connections. The current work describes a physics-based approach to neuronal shape modeling and synthesis and its consideration for the…
Certain regulatory proteins influence the polymerization dynamics of microtubules by inducing catastrophe with a rate that depends on the microtubule length. Using a discrete formulation, here we show that, for a catastrophe rate…