Related papers: Disorder in cellular packing can alter proliferati…
Oscillations represent a ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. The conventional models of biological periodic oscillations are usually proposed as interconnecting transcriptional feedback loops. Some specific proteins function as…
The dispersal of cells from an initially constrained location is a crucial aspect of many physiological phenomena ranging from morphogenesis to tumour spreading. In such processes, the way cell-cell interactions impact the motion of single…
Single-cell experiments have revealed cell-to-cell variability in generation times and growth rates for genetically identical cells. Theoretical models relating the fluctuating generation times of single cells to the population growth rate…
The spread of a particular trait in a cell population often is modelled by an appropriate system of ordinary differential equations describing how the sizes of subpopulations of the cells with the same genome change in time. On the other…
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…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
Collective cell migration lies at the intersection of developmental biology and non-equilibrium physics, where active processes give rise to emergent patterns that are biologically relevant. Here, we investigate dilatational modes--cycles…
Signaling pathways serve to communicate information about extracellular conditions into the cell, to both the nucleus and cytoplasmic processes to control cell responses. Genetic mutations in signaling network components are frequently…
The spontaneous generation of electrical activity underpins a number of essential physiological processes, and is observed even in tissues where specialized pacemaker cells have not been identified. The emergence of periodic oscillations in…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
Tissue homeostasis, the biological process of maintaining a steady state in tissue via control of cell proliferation, death, and metabolic function, is essential for the development, growth, maintenance, and proper function of living…
We investigate the oscillatory dynamics and bifurcation structure of a reaction-diffusion system with bistable nonlinearity and mass conservation, which was proposed by [Otsuji et al, PLoS Comp. Biol. 3 (2007), e108]. The system is a useful…
In this paper, a two-dimensional model for the growth of multi-layer tumors is presented. The model consists of a free boundary problem for the tumor cell membrane and the tumor is supposed to grow or shrink due to cell proliferation or…
Within a continuous-time, stochastic model of single-cell size homeostasis, we study how the structure of feedback from size to growth rates and cell-cycle progression shapes overall size dynamics, both within and across cell cycles. We…
Collective cell migration plays an essential role in various biological processes, such as development or cancer proliferation. While cell-cell interactions are clearly key determinants of collective cell migration -- in addition to…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
Collective sensing by interacting cells is observed in a variety of biological systems, and yet a quantitative understanding of how sensory information is collectively encoded is lacking. Here we investigate the ATP-induced calcium dynamics…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
Contact inhibition limits migration and proliferation of cells in cell colonies. We consider a multiphase field model to investigate the growth dynamics of a cell colony, composed of proliferating cells. The model takes into account the…