Related papers: Physical limits on galvanotaxis
Control of the cytoskeleton and mechanical contacts with the extracellular environment are essential component of motility in eukaryotic cells. In the absence of signals, cells continuously rebuild the cytoskeleton and periodically extend…
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…
When it is polarised, a cell develops an asymmetric distribution of specific molecular markers, cytoskeleton and cell membrane shape. Polarisation can occur spontaneously or be triggered by external signals, like gradients of signalling…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
The motion of a eukaryotic cell presents a variety of interesting and challenging problems from both a modeling and a computational perspective. The processes span many spatial scales (from molecular to tissue) as well as disparate time…
Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…
Some dividing cells sense their shape by becoming polarized along their long axis. Cell polarity is controlled in part by polarity proteins like Rho GTPases cycling between active membrane-bound forms and inactive cytosolic forms, modeled…
Here we characterized an information measure for cell polarity that applies to non-motile cells responding to a chemical gradient. The central idea is that polarization represents information about the direction of the gradient. We applied…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Many eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients by directly measuring spatial concentration differences. The precision of such gradient sensing is limited by fluctuations in the binding of diffusing particles to specific…
An alternating gradient electric guide provides a way to transport a wide variety of polar molecules, including those in high-field seeking states. We investigate the motion of polar molecules in such a guide by measuring the transmission…
Chemotactic cells of eukaryotic organisms are able to accurately sense shallow chemical concentration gradients using cell-surface receptors. This sensing ability is remarkable as cells must be able to spatially resolve small fractional…
Cells have the ability to detect electric fields and respond to them with directed migratory movement. Investigations identified genes and proteins that play important roles in defining the migration efficiency. Nevertheless, the sensing…
Various molecules exclusively accumulate at the front or back of migrating eukaryotic cells in response to a shallow gradient of extracellular signals. Directional sensing and signal amplification highlight the essential properties in the…
Recent experiments suggest that the interplay between cells and the mechanics of their substrate gives rise to a diversity of morphological and migrational behaviors. Here, we develop a Cellular Potts Model of polarizing cells on a…
We investigate how light polarization affects the motion of photo-responsive algae, \textit{Euglena gracilis}. In a uniformly polarized field, cells swim approximately perpendicular to the polarization direction and form a nematic state…
Collective response to external directional cues like electric fields plays a pivotal role in processes such as tissue development, regeneration, and wound healing. In this study we focus on the impact of anisotropy in cell shape and local…
Motile eukaryotic cells display distinct modes of migration that often occur within the same cell type. It remains unclear, however, whether transitions between the migratory modes require changes in external conditions, or whether the…
The chemotaxis pathway in the bacterium Escherichia coli allows cells to detect changes in external ligand concentration (e.g. nutrients). The pathway regulates the flagellated rotary motors and hence the cells' swimming behaviour, steering…
We study how simple eukaryotic organisms make decisions in response to competing stimuli in the context of phototaxis by the unicellular alga $Chlamydomonas~reinhardtii$. While negatively phototactic cells swim directly away from a…