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Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
We measure different contributions to entropy production in a living functional epithelial tissue. We do this by extracting the functional dynamics of development while at the same time quantifying fluctuations. Using the translucent…
Cancer stem cells are controlled by developmental networks that are often topologically indistinguishable from normal, healthy stem cells. The question is why cancer stem cells can be both phenotypically distinct and have morphological…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
Constraints on changes in expression levels across all cell components imposed by the steady growth of cells have recently been discussed both experimentally and theoretically. By assuming a small environmental perturbation and considering…
Cell growth and gene expression, essential elements of all living systems, have long been the focus of biophysical interrogation. Advances in single-cell methods have invigorated theoretical studies into these processes. However, until…
From the response to external stimuli to cell division and death, the dynamics of living cells is based on the expression of specific genes at specific times. The decision when to express a gene is implemented by the binding and unbinding…
Cells are known to utilize biochemical noise to probabilistically switch between distinct gene expression states. We demonstrate that such noise-driven switching is dominated by tails of probability distributions and is therefore…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…
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…
Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
Communication between cells is realized by exchange of biochemical substances. Due to internal organization of living systems and variability of external parameters, the exchange is heavily influenced by perturbations of various parameters…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
We cast the metabolism of interacting cells within a statistical mechanics framework considering both, the actual phenotypic capacities of each cell and its interaction with its neighbors. Reaction fluxes will be the components of…
Since the discovery of a cancer initiating side population in solid tumours, studies focussing on the role of so-called cancer stem cells in cancer initiation and progression have abounded. The biological interrogation of these cells has…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…