Related papers: Flagellar length control in multiflagellated eukar…
Evolutionary game dynamics are often studied in the context of different population structures. Here we propose a new population structure that is inspired by simple multicellular life forms. In our model, cells reproduce but can stay…
The bacterial flagellar motor drives the rotation of flagellar filaments and enables many species of bacteria to swim. Torque is generated by interaction of stator units, anchored to the peptidoglycan cell wall, with the rotor. Recent…
Biological cells use droplets to separate components and spatially control their interior. Experiments demonstrate that the complex, crowded cellular environment affects the droplet arrangement and their sizes. To understand this behavior,…
Interactions between microorganisms and solid boundaries play an important role in biological processes, like egg fertilisation, biofilm formation and soil colonisation, where microswimmers move within a structured environment. Despite…
The Voronoi tessellation of a homogeneous Poisson point process in the lower half-plane gives rise to a family of vertical elongated cells in the upper half-plane. The set of edges of these cells is ruled by a Markovian branching mechanism…
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…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
Networks exhibiting "accelerating" growth have total link numbers growing faster than linearly with network size and can exhibit transitions from stationary to nonstationary statistics and from random to scale-free to regular statistics at…
To survive in harsh conditions, motile bacteria swim in complex environment and respond to the surrounding flow. Here we develop a PDE model describing how the flagella bending affects macroscopic properties of bacterial suspensions. First,…
Microorganisms, such as bacteria and microalgae, often live in habitats consisting of a liquid phase and a plethora of interfaces. The precise ways in which these motile microbes behave in their confined environment remain unclear. Using…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional…
Guided movement in response to slowly diffusing polymeric trails provides a unique mechanism for self-organization of some microorganisms. To elucidate how this signaling route leads to microcolony formation, we experimentally probe the…
An important question in biology is how the relative size of different organs is kept nearly constant during growth of an animal. This property, called proportionate growth, has received increased attention in recent years. We discuss our…
A fundamental issue in biology is the nature of evolutionary transitions from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Volvocine algae are models for this transition, as they span from the unicellular biflagellate Chlamydomonas to…
We analyze the advantage of cell size control strategies in growing populations under mortality constraints. We demonstrate a general advantage of the adder control strategy in the presence of growth-dependent mortality, and for different…
The mean length and the variability of coding sequences for 48 genomes of bacteria and archaea were analyzed. It was found that the plotted data can be described by an angular area. This suggests the followings: a) The variability of a…
Time series of cell size evolution in unicellular marine algae (division Haptophyta; Coccolithus lineage), covering 57 million years, are studied by a system of linear stochastic differential equations of hierarchical structure. The data…
Flagella are hair-like appendages attached to microorganisms that allow the organisms to traverse their fluid environment. The algae Volvox are spherical swimmers with thousands of individual flagella on their surface and their coordination…