Related papers: Balancing at the edge of excitability: Implication…

Microorganisms often perform chemotaxis, (i.e., sensing and moving toward a region with a higher concentration of an attractive chemical) by changing the rate of tumbling for random walk. We studied several models with internal adaptive…

In the chemotactic motion of Escherichia coli, the switching of transmembrane chemoreceptors between active and inactive states is one of the most important steps of the signaling pathway. We study the effect of this switching time-scale on…

Adaptation mechanism of cells on the basis of stochastic gene expression and epigenetic modification is proposed. From marginally stable states generated by epigenetic modification, a gene expression pattern that achieves greater cell…

Biological cells are able to adapt their behaviour in response to environmental cues. Durotaxis is a phenomenon in which cells adjust their migration depending on the mechanical properties of a surrounding substrate. Although durotaxis has…

Eukaryotic cells respond to a chemoattractant gradient by forming intracellular gradients of signaling molecules that reflect the extracellular chemical gradient - an ability called directional sensing. Quantitative experiments have…

All cells must keep time to consistently perform vital biological functions. To that end, the coupling and interrelatedness of diverse subsecond events in the complex cellular environment, such as protein folding or translation rates,…

Many eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can exhibit remarkable sensing ability under small gradient of chemical compound. In this study, we approach this phenomenon by considering the contribution of multiple ligands to the chemical kinetics…

The response of microbes to external signals is mediated by biochemical networks with intrinsic time scales. These time scales give rise to a memory that impacts cellular behaviour. Here we study theoretically the role of cellular memory in…

Feedback loops are essential for regulating cell proliferation and maintaining the delicate balance between cell division and cell death. Thanks to the exact solution of a few simple models of cell growth it is by now clear that stochastic…

Microorganisms like bacteria can sense concentration of chemo-attractants in its medium very accurately. They achieve this through interaction between the receptors on their cell surface and the chemo-attractant molecules (like sugar). But…

In the Drosophila melanogaster egg chamber, the collective migration of border cells toward the oocyte is guided by spatial gradients of chemoattractants. While cellular responses to these cues are well characterized, the spatial…

Chemotaxis is typically modeled in the context of cellular motion towards a static, exogenous source of chemoattractant. Here, we propose a time-dependent mechanism of chemotaxis in which a self-propelled particle ({\it e.g.}, a cell)…

This study investigates the potential impact of intramolecular excitations on the active regions of biomolecular chains, which may play a role in physiological processes within living cells. We assumed that an excitation localized in a…

Understanding deaths and life-death boundaries of cells is a fundamental challenge in biological sciences. In this study, we present a theoretical framework for investigating cell death. We conceptualize cell death as a controllability…

How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…

We consider the reduced dynamics of a molecular chain weakly coupled to a phonon bath. With a small and constant inhomogeneity in the coupling, the excitation relaxation rates are obtained in closed form. They are dominated by transitions…

The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…

Bacteria are able to respond to environmental signals by changing their rules of movement. When we take into account chemical signals in the environment, this behaviour is often called chemotaxis. At the individual-level, chemotaxis…

Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is…

Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…