Related papers: Organ-specific Branching Morphogenesis
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of materials and information between cells and their organelles. Further, lipid composition and morphology can play a key role in regulating a variety of biological processes. For example, viral uptake,…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
Channel formation and branching is widely seen in physical systems where movement of fluid through a porous structure causes the spatiotemporal evolution of the medium in response to the flow, in turn causing flow pathways to evolve. We…
Developing effective therapies against epilepsy remains a challenge. The complex and multifaceted nature of this disease still fuels controversies about its origin. In this perspective article, we argue that conflicting hypotheses can be…
Impedance Spectroscopy resolves electrical properties into uncorrelated variables, as a function of frequency, with exquisite resolution. Separation is robust and most useful when the system is linear. Impedance spectroscopy combined with…
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes…
We study theoretically the shapes of biological tubes affected by various pathologies. When epithelial cells grow at an uncontrolled rate, the negative tension produced by their division provokes a buckling instability. Several shapes are…
The study of organoids, artificially grown cell aggregates with the functionality and small-scale anatomy of real organs, is one of the most active areas of research in biology and biophysics, yet the basic physical origins of their…
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…
Branching architecture characterizes numerous systems, ranging from synthetic (hyper)branched polymers and biomolecules such as lignin, amylopectin, and nucleic acids to tracheal and neuronal networks. Its ubiquity reflects the many…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
During embryonic morpho-genesis, a collection of individual neurons turns into a functioning network with unique capabilities. Only recently has this most staggering example of emergent process in the natural world, began to be studied.…
In growing plant cells, parallel ordering of microtubules (MTs) along the inner surface of the cell membrane influences the direction of cell expansion and thereby plant morphology. For correct expansion of organs that primarily grow by…
Animal morphogenesis involves complex tissue deformation processes, which require tight control over tissue rheology. Yet, it remains insufficiently understood how tissue rheology results from the interplay between cellular packing and…
Notch signaling is an evolutionary conserved cell-cell communication pathway. Besides regulating cell-fate decisions at an individual cell level, Notch signaling coordinates the emergent spatiotemporal patterning in a tissue through…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
Neuroblastoma is a paediatric extracranial solid cancer that arises from the developing sympathetic nervous system and is characterised by an abnormal distribution of cell types in tumours compared to healthy infant tissues. In this paper,…
The brain is made up of a vast set of heterogeneous regions that dynamically organize into pathways as a function of task demands. Examples of such pathways can be found in the interactions between cortical and subcortical networks during…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…