Related papers: Immune cells use active tugging forces to distingu…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
Cytotoxic T lymphocytes eliminate infected or malignant cells, safeguarding surrounding tissues. Although experimental and systems-immunology studies have cataloged many molecular and cellular actors involved in an immune response, the…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
In multi-cellular organisms, cells differentiate into multiple types as they divide. States of these cell types, as well as their numbers, are known to be robust to external perturbations; as conceptualized by Waddington's epigenetic…
In this article, I advance the idea that physics plays a central role in cell differentiation and makes fundamental contributions to morphogenesis, revealing the totipotent nature of the zygote. Totipotency is a persistent mechanical memory…
Many biological networks have to filter out useful information from a vast excess of spurious interactions. We use computational evolution to predict design features of networks processing ligand categorization. The important problem of…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
Adhesion-dependent cells actively sense the mechanical properties of their environment through mechanotransductory processes at focal adhesions, which are integrin-based contacts connecting the extracellular matrix to the cytoskeleton. Here…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
The vertebrate immune system is a wonder of modern evolution. Occasionally, however, correlations within the immune system lead to inappropriate recruitment of preexisting T cells against novel viral diseases. We present a random energy…
Living cells exhibit an important out-of-equilibrium mechanical activity, mainly due to the forces generated by molecular motors. These motor proteins, acting individually or collectively on the cytoskeleton, contribute to the violation of…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
Repeated interaction between individuals is the main mechanism for maintaining cooperation in social dilemma situations. Variants of tit-for-tat (repeating the previous action of the opponent) and the win-stay lose-shift strategy are known…
The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self or non-self substances. It does this with the help of…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Dendritic cells are antigen presenting cells that provide a vital link between the innate and adaptive immune system. Research into this family of cells has revealed that they perform the role of coordinating T-cell based immune responses,…
Biological organisms have evolved a wide range of immune mechanisms to defend themselves against pathogens. Beyond molecular details, these mechanisms differ in how protection is acquired, processed and passed on to subsequent generations…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…