Related papers: Multigenerational memory in bacterial size control
Cellular phenotype is characterized by different components such as cell size, protein content and cell cycle time. These are global variables that are the outcome of multiple internal microscopic processes. Accordingly, they display some…
In varying environments it is beneficial for organisms to utilize available cues to infer the conditions they may encounter and express potentially favorable traits. However, external cues can be unreliable or too costly to use. We consider…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
Cells control their size to cope with noise during growth and division. Eukaryotic cells exhibiting "sizer" control (targeting a specific size before dividing) may rely on molecular concentration thresholds, but simple implementations of…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…
Synthetic biology aims at designing modular genetic circuits that can be assembled according to the desired function. When embedded in a cell, a circuit module becomes a small subnetwork within a larger environmental network, and its…
Organisms maintain the status quo, holding key physiological variables constant to within an acceptable tolerance, and yet adapt with precision and plasticity to dynamic changes in externalities. What organizational principles ensure such…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
How cells maintain a stable size has fascinated scientists since the beginning of modern biology, but has remained largely mysterious. Recently, however, the ability to analyze single bacteria in real time has provided new, important…
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…
Self-organization of proteins in space and time is of crucial importance for the functioning of cellular processes. Often, this organization takes place in the presence of strong random fluctuations due to the small number of molecules…
Bacteria are able to maintain a narrow distribution of cell sizes by regulating the timing of cell divisions. In rich nutrient conditions, cells divide much faster than their chromosomes replicate. This implies that cells maintain multiple…
The mechanism by which cells measure the dimension of the organ in which they are embedded, and slow down their growth when the final size is reached, is a long-standing problem of developmental biology. The role of mechanics in this…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…
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…
Growth-fragmentation processes model systems of cells that grow continuously over time and then fragment into smaller pieces. Typically, on average, the number of cells in the system exhibits asynchronous exponential growth and, upon…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…