Related papers: Overflow metabolism originates from growth optimiz…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
Integrated global food system analysis is hampered by the fragmentation of data among food types, processes, and scales. Studies also often neglect the connection to human metabolism -- the ultimate driver of food demand. Here we use a…
Cancer cells maintain a high level of aerobic glycolysis (the Warburg effect), which is associated with their rapid proliferation. Many studies have reported that the suppression of glycolysis and activation of oxidative phosphorylation can…
Microbes produce metabolic resources that are important for cell growth yet leak across membranes into the extracellular environment. Other microbes in the same environment can use these resources and adjust their own metabolic production…
Obesity does not emerge abruptly; rather, it develops gradually over extended periods. The gradual progression often prevents early recognition of physiological changes until excess adiposity is established. A common belief is that weight…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
Metabolic heterogeneity is widely recognised as the next challenge in our understanding of non-genetic variation. A growing body of evidence suggests that metabolic heterogeneity may result from the inherent stochasticity of intracellular…
All cells derive nutrition by absorbing some chemical and energy resources from the environment; these resources are used by the cells to reproduce the chemicals within them, which in turn leads to an increase in their volume. In this…
Identifying the physical basis of heterosis (or hybrid vigor) has remained elusive despite over a hundred years of research on the subject. The three main theories of heterosis are dominance theory, overdominance theory, and epistasis…
New experimental results on bacterial growth inspire a novel top-down approach to study cell metabolism, combining mass balance and proteomic constraints to extend and complement Flux Balance Analysis. We introduce here Constrained…
Understanding the emergence and evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation is a core problem in biology. We develop a quantitative model that shows that a multicellular form emerges from genetically identical unicellular…
An imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure will lead to a change in body weight (mass) and body composition (fat and lean masses). A quantitative understanding of the processes involved, which currently remains lacking, will…
Developing epithelial tissues coordinate cell proliferation and mechanical forces to achieve proper size and shape. As epithelial cells tightly adhere together to form the confluent tissue, the distribution of cell areas significantly…
Production of energy is a foundation of life. Metabolic rate of organisms (amount of energy produced per unit time) generally increases slower than organisms' mass, which has important implications for life organization. This phenomenon,…
The origin and shape of metabolic scaling has been controversial since Kleiber found that basal metabolic rate of animals seemed to vary as a power law of their body mass with exponent 3/4, instead of 2/3, as a surface-to-volume argument…
We study an optimal control problem arising from a resource allocation problem in cellular metabolism. A minimalistic model that describes the production of enzymatic vs. non-enzymatic biomass components from a single nutrient source is…
In this paper, we propose a tumor growth model to incorporate and investigate the spatial effects of autophagy. The cells are classified into two phases: normal cells and autophagic cells, whose dynamics are also coupled with the nutrients.…
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…
Metabolic scaling is one of the most important patterns in biology. Theory explaining the 3/4-power size-scaling of biological metabolic rate does not predict the non-linear scaling observed for smaller life forms. Here we present a new…
Protein expression levels optimize cell fitness: Too low an expression level of essential proteins will slow growth by compromising essential processes; whereas overexpression slows growth by increasing the metabolic load. This trade-off…